While these thoughts were passing through his mind the ceremony had already begun, and the principal personages in the drama were ranged before him in the row of crimson velvet chairs which fills the foreground of a Catholic marriage.  Through the glow of lights and the perfumed haze about the altar, Garnett’s eyes rested on the central figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared from his view and his mind.  After all, neither Mrs. Newell’s schmes nor his own share in them could ever unsanctify hermione’s marriage.  It was one more testimony to life’s indefatigable renewals, to nature’s secret of drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his eyes turned from the girl’s illuminated presence to the resigned and stoical figure sunk in the adjoining chair, it occured to him that he had perhaps worked better than he knew in placing them, if only for a moment, side by side.

IN TRUST

IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth his plans.

They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed, the ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy millions of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed out, now live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated ugliness.

“I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost inheritance, to the divine past they’ve thrown away—­I want to make ’em hate ugliness so that they’ll smash nearly everything in sight,” he would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in the fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.

“You might set the example by smashing that table,” I once suggested with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a surprised glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental library, in which we sat.

His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of black walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to his guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of Aubusson carpet:  “This, sir, is Dabney’s first study for the Niagara—­the Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in Rome twenty years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson—­” by token of which he passed for a Maecenas in the New York of the ‘forties,’ and a poem had once been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty “On a picture in the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre.”

Since then the house had remained unchanged.  Paul’s father, a frugal liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit old Jonathan’s artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor.  It was only in Paul that the grandfather’s aesthetic faculty revived, and Mrs. Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they watched the little pale-browed boy poring over an old number of the Art Journal: “Paul will know how to appreciate your father’s treasures.”