The night was very warm but the room was deliciously cool.  A breath of sweet coolness came from one of the walls.  Maria, contrary to her wont, fell asleep almost immediately.  She was exhausted, and an unusual peace seemed to soothe her very soul.  She felt as if she had really died and gotten safe to Heaven.  She said her prayers, then she was asleep.  She awoke rather late the next morning, and took her bath, and then her breakfast was brought.  When that was finished and she was dressed, it was ten o’clock, and the maid Adelaide came to take her to her hostess.  Maria went down one elevator and up another, the one in which she had seen Miss Blair ascend the night before.  Then she entered a strange room, in the midst of which sat Miss Blair.  To Maria’s utter amazement, she no longer seemed in the least deformed, she no longer seemed a dwarf.  She was in perfect harmony with the room, which was low-ceiled, full of strange curves and low furniture with curved backs.  It was all Eastern, as was the first floor of the house.  Maria understood with a sort of intuition that this was necessary.  The walls were covered with Eastern hangings, tables of lacquer stood about filled with squat bronzes and gemlike ivory carvings.  The hangings were all embroidered in short curve effects.  Maria realized that her hostess, in this room, made more of a harmony than she herself.  She felt herself large, coarse, and common where she should have been tiny, bizarre, and, according to the usual standard, misformed.  Miss Blair had planned for herself a room wherein everything was misformed, and in which she herself was in keeping.  It had been partly the case on the first floor of the house.  Here it was wholly.  Maria sat down in one of the squat, curved-back chairs, and Miss Blair, who was opposite, looked at her, then laughed with the open delight of a child.

“What a pity I cannot make the whole earth over to suit me,” she said, “instead of only this one room!  Now I look entirely perfect to you, do I not?”

“Yes,” Maria replied, looking at her with wonder.

“It is my vanity room,” said Miss Blair, and she laughed as if she were laughing at herself.  Then she added, with a little pathos, “You yourself, if you had been in my place, would have wanted one little corner in which you could be perfect.”

“Yes, I should,” said Maria.  As she spoke she settled herself down lower in her chair.

“Yes, you do look entirely too tall and straight in here,” said Miss Blair, and laughed again, with genuine glee.  “Beauty is only a matter of comparison, you know,” said she.  “If one is ugly and misshapen, all she has to do is to surround herself with things ugly and misshapen, and she gets the effect of perfect harmony, which is the highest beauty in the world.  Here I am in harmony after I have been out of tune.  It is a comfort.  But, after all, being out of tune is not the worst thing in the world.  It might be worse.  I would not make the world over to suit me, but myself to suit the world, if I could.  After all, the world is right and I am wrong, but in here I seem to be right.  Now, child, tell me about yourself.”