Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/251

 formances. Just as by the fineness of his taste, Rembrandt softened the hideousness of a lurid subject in his Anatomy Lesson, so the exquisite charm of Peter's personality overcame any possible repugnance to anything he might choose to do.

During this last year in New York, he lived in an old house on Beekman Place, that splendid row, just two blocks long, of mellow brown-stone dwellings, with flights of steps, which back upon the East River at Fiftieth Street. We often sat on the balcony, looking over towards the span of the Queensboro Bridge, Blackwell's Island, with its turreted and battlemented castles so like the Mysteries of Udolpho, watching the gulls sweep over the surface of the water, the smoke wreathe from the factory chimneys, and the craft on the river, with cargoes "of Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, fire-wood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays," of the city, but seemingly away from it, with our backs to it, literally, indeed, while life ebbed by. And, at my side, too, I saw it slowly ebbing.

The interior, one of those fine old New York interiors, with high ceilings, bordered with plaster guilloches, white carved marble fire-places, sliding doors, and huge crystal chandeliers, whose pendants jingled when some one walked on the floor above, it had been his happy fancy to decorate in the early Victorian manner. The furniture, to be sure, was mostly Chippendale, Sheraton, and Heppelwhite, but there were also heavy carved walnut chairs,