Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/145

 that had been falling all morning. For some moments he stood at the window, his own thoughts slightly feverish, looking out into the clean, bleak street and across at the studied pattern of the trees in the Parc Monceau. This was patently another of the tomorrows on which life was foredoomed to take a new spurt, for these unexpected surroundings were charged with some psychic force that both excited him and made him uneasy. Something came at him from the walls and the chairs that held him stock still and gave him the impression that to cough or make any human sound would be catastrophic. Much had happened in this room: there must have been nights when the great dark yellow curtains had been drawn across the windows and the discreet Venetian lanterns which projected from the angle of the floor slantwise toward the ceiling had shed a subtle glow over people whose lives were written in some fascinating cypher. The low couches, the rich hangings, the solidity and delicacy of the lines bespoke a proprietor whose tastes were at once robust and finely corrupt,—moreover a proprietor who was certainly not Léon Vaudreuil. Vaudreuil would fit into the room, a sort of human carved ivory, but he could not by any stretch of the imagination have dominated it, much less conceived it.

All of a sudden Vaudreuil was there. He had emerged through a door behind the sleek black piano, dressed in a frayed silk dressing gown. Grover was thinking of the sickly de Musset, appearing at the door