“Are you going to notice the thing seriously?  Personally, I am writing it up as a practical joke!  We are giving him half a column—­Lord knows what for!—­but I can’t see how to handle it except as funny stuff.”

“But, for heaven’s sake... what does he...  Call it?” muttered Denise Ryland, holding a pair of gold rimmed pince-nez before her eyes, and shifting them to and fro in an endeavor to focus the canvas.

“‘Our Lady of the Poppies,’” replied the journalist.  “Do you think it’s intended to mean anything in particular?”

The question was no light one; it embodied a problem not readily solved.  The scene depicted, and depicted with a skill, with a technical mastery of the bizarre that had in it something horrible—­was a long narrow room—­or, properly, cavern.  The walls apparently were hewn from black rock, and at regular intervals, placed some three feet from these gleaming walls, uprose slender golden pillars supporting a kind of fretwork arch which entirely masked the ceiling.  The point of sight adopted by the painter was peculiar.  One apparently looked down into this apartment from some spot elevated fourteen feet or more above the floor level.  The floor, which was black and polished, was strewn with tiger skins; and little, inlaid tables and garishly colored cushions were spread about in confusion, whilst cushioned divans occupied the visible corners of the place.  The lighting was very “advanced”:  a lamp, having a kaleidoscopic shade, swung from the center of the roof low into the room and furnished all the illumination.

Three doors were visible; one, directly in line at the further end of the place, apparently of carved ebony inlaid with ivory; another, on the right, of lemon wood or something allied to it, and inlaid with a design in some emerald hued material; with a third, corresponding door, on the left, just barely visible to the spectator.

Two figures appeared.  One was that of a Chinaman in a green robe scarcely distinguishable from the cushions surrounding him, who crouched upon the divan to the left of the central door, smoking a long bamboo pipe.  His face was the leering face of a yellow satyr.  But, dominating the composition, and so conceived in form, in color, and in lighting, as to claim the attention centrally, so that the other extravagant details became but a setting for it, was another figure.

Upon a slender ivory pedestal crouched a golden dragon, and before the pedestal was placed a huge Chinese vase of the indeterminate pink seen in the heart of a rose, and so skilfully colored as to suggest an internal luminousness.  The vase was loaded with a mass of exotic poppies, a riotous splash of color; whilst beside this vase, and slightly in front of the pedestal, stood the figure presumably intended to represent the Lady of the Poppies who gave title to the picture.