a similarity of taste in household decoration, and they had gone together to a great emporium in Boston to choose the furniture and fittings.  The lamp in the centre of the table was a bronze column supporting a hemisphere of heavy red and emerald glass, the colours woven into an intricate and bizarre design, after the manner of the art nouveau—­so the zealous salesman had informed them.  Cora Ditmar, when exhibiting this lamp to admiring visitors, had remembered the phrase, though her pronunciation of it, according to the standard of the Sorbonne, left something to be desired.  The table and chairs, of heavy, shiny oak marvellously and precisely carved by machines, matched the big panels of the wainscot.  The windows were high in the wall, thus preventing any intrusion from the clothes-yard on which they looked.  The bookcases, protected by leaded panes, held countless volumes of the fiction from which Cora Ditmar had derived her knowledge of the great world outside of Hampton, together with certain sets she had bought, not only as ornaments, but with a praiseworthy view to future culture,—­such as Whitmarsh’s Library of the Best Literature.  These volumes, alas, were still uncut; but some of the pages of the novels—­if one cared to open them—­were stained with chocolate.  The steam radiator was a decoration in itself, the fireplace set in the red and yellow tiles that made the hearth.  Above the oak mantel, in a gold frame, was a large coloured print of a Magdalen, doubled up in grief, with a glory of loose, Titian hair, chosen by Ditmar himself as expressing the nearest possible artistic representation of his ideal of the female form.  Cora Ditmar’s objections on the score of voluptuousness and of insufficient clothing had been vain.  She had recognized no immorality of sentimentality in the art itself; what she felt, and with some justice, was that this particular Magdalen was unrepentant, and that Ditmar knew it.  And the picture remained an offence to her as long as she lived.  Formerly he had enjoyed the contemplation of this figure, reminding him, as it did, of mellowed moments in conquests of the past; suggesting also possibilities of the future.  For he had been quick to discount the attitude of bowed despair, the sop flung by a sensuous artist to Christian orthodoxy.  He had been sceptical about despair—­feminine despair, which could always be cured by gifts and baubles.  But to-night, as he raised his eyes, he felt a queer sensation marring the ecstatic perfection of his mood.  That quality in the picture which so long had satisfied and entranced him had now become repellent, an ugly significant reflection of something —­something in himself he was suddenly eager to repudiate and deny.  It was with a certain amazement that he found himself on his feet with the picture in his hand, gazing at the empty space where it had hung.  For he had had no apparent intention of obeying that impulse.  What should he do with it?  Light the fire and burn it—­frame and all?  The frame was