to the extent of taking a hand at bridge: this man seemed, hidden from every one of them, to lead a rich, abundant life, a secret, inner life, a life not of one age but of many. Because he never spoke, they looked upon him as a crank; but he had lived his years abundantly. Had he filled his silent, uncompanioned loneliness too full with the ghosts of literature, history and art? Had the ghosts loomed up and come to life around him, in that dark and gloomy room, where the old and modern porcelain and earthenware glowed and rioted around him with the haunting brilliancy of their colours and glazes, of their tortured, gorgeous curves and outlines?
The two brothers, who had come because they thought their brother mad, looked round the room; and to both of them the room also seemed mad. To the captain of hussars, whose earlier depression had passed off, who suddenly felt himself becoming healthy and normal again as he listened to his eccentric brother's ravings, the room became a demented room, because it lacked a trophy of arms, riding-whips, prints of horses and dogs and the oleograph of a naked woman, bending backwards and laughing. To the other brother the room also seemed demented because here the vase was no longer an ornament, because the vase had become a morbid thing, like a many-coloured weed, growing in rank profusion among the dark shadows of
