Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/114

 pleasures soon ceasing to divert him, Gareth had transformed the loft into a kind of studio-museum where he might assemble and gloat over his collected treasures. Held to belong exclusively to him, no housemaid was ever permitted to invade this garret in the barn. A few of Gareth's friends had been invited to ascend to it, and his mother had frequently been a guest there, but such dusting and sweeping as were done at all were done by Gareth himself.

On the wall he had hung a few magazine posters by Archie Gunn, Maxfield Parrish, and Edward Penfield. There were lithographs by Frederic Remington, and half-tones of wash- and pen-drawings by Thure de Thulstrup, A. B. Wenzell, and Charles Dana Gibson, illustrations for stories, which Gareth had clipped from periodicals. The few articles of furniture, a black-walnut desk, the chairs, a bookcase, and a couch, Gareth had discovered on the floor below, and repaired sufficiently so that they might be useful.

The room represented several eras in Gareth's collecting activities: the era of postage-stamps, the era of cigarette-pictures, and the era of birds'-eggs. Whether because he was of a sentimental or a cynical turn of mind, and it will presently be made apparent that he was paradoxically something of both, it had been Gareth's whim not to change too much from month to month the aspect of this chamber, notwithstanding the fact that he fully sensed that