Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/118

 were, of course, many other books: John Gabriel Borkman, in William Archer's translation, recently issued by Stone and Kimball in Chicago; he had bought D'Annunzio's Triumph of Death because Anthony Comstock had succeeded, for a week or two, in stopping the sale of this novel in New York, and he wanted to find out why; The Red Badge of Courage, The Third Violet, Chimmie Fadden, Quo Vadis?Vadis?, [sic] The Quest of the Golden Girl, The Descendant, Mrs. Cliff's Yacht: these were a few of the newer titles.

But it was not, after all, through his books that Gareth had learned the most. His books, like his tobacco-pictures and his birds'-eggs offered him another means of escape from the environment which he detested. Quite possibly, however, his imagination was his principal aid in this respect. He possessed a curious gift of divination; he divined what he had not experienced. Before he fell asleep at night pictures of faces often formed themselves behind his closed eyelids. Changing expression, rapidly they shifted into other forms. The strange thing was that none of these faces he remembered ever having seen before. Frequently the heads were attired in fantastic foreign head-dresses; often a face and its expression would be so sinister as to suggest that of a murderer; again, one would appear to interpret perfect innocence. He had inherited a power to dream which lent him the ability to create beauty even out of the ugliness which