Certainly there was some mystery about him.  Those barriers that are closed between most people and that are lowered with time when sympathy, similar tastes, equal intellectual culture and constant intercourse remove constraint—­those barriers seemed not to exist between him and me, and no doubt this was the case between him and all people, both men and women, whom fate threw in his path.

After half an hour we parted, promising to see each other often, and he gave me his address after inviting me to take luncheon with him in two days.

I forgot what hour he had stated, and I arrived too soon; he was not yet home.  A correct and silent domestic showed me into a beautiful, quiet, softly lighted parlor.  I felt comfortable there, at home.  How often I have noticed the influence of apartments on the character and on the mind!  There are some which make one feel foolish; in others, on the contrary, one always feels lively.  Some make us sad, although well lighted and decorated in light-colored furniture; others cheer us up, although hung with sombre material.  Our eye, like our heart, has its likes and dislikes, of which it does not inform us, and which it secretly imposes on our temperament.  The harmony of furniture, walls, the style of an ensemble, act immediately on our mental state, just as the air from the woods, the sea or the mountains modifies our physical natures.

I sat down on a cushion-covered divan and felt myself suddenly carried and supported by these little silk bags of feathers, as if the outline of my body had been marked out beforehand on this couch.

Then I looked about.  There was nothing striking about the room; every-where were beautiful and modest things, simple and rare furniture, Oriental curtains which did not seem to come from a department store but from the interior of a harem; and exactly opposite me hung the portrait of a woman.  It was a portrait of medium size, showing the head and the upper part of the body, and the hands, which were holding a book.  She was young, bareheaded; ribbons were woven in her hair; she was smiling sadly.  Was it because she was bareheaded, was it merely her natural expression?  I never have seen a portrait of a lady which seemed so much in its place as that one in that dwelling.  Of all those I knew I have seen nothing like that one.  All those that I know are on exhibition, whether the lady be dressed in her gaudiest gown, with an attractive headdress and a look which shows that she is posing first of all before the artist and then before those who will look at her or whether they have taken a comfortable attitude in an ordinary gown.  Some are standing majestically in all their beauty, which is not at all natural to them in life.  All of them have something, a flower or, a jewel, a crease in the dress or a curve of the lip, which one feels to have been placed there for effect by the artist.  Whether they wear a hat or merely their hair one can immediately notice that they are not entirely natural.  Why?  One cannot say without knowing them, but the effect is there.  They seem to be calling somewhere, on people whom they wish to please and to whom they wish to appear at their best advantage; and they have studied their attitudes, sometimes modest, Sometimes haughty.