forted him, because he did not know them and because they did not know him.
So he felt safe with them. He could look at them without blushing.
It was only when he turned his back to the window, when he shut out the world from his ears and his eyes, when he felt the choking, mephitic solitude of the four walls that he thought. And he did not like to think.
For here, in the little gray room on East Eleventh, with his back to the world of strangers who crowded the streets, he saw the life which he lived as he was living it; and it was mainly expressed by the furniture which packed its corners—the iron bed, the gangrened deal table, the ridiculous spindle-legged bureau, and the horrible, fly-specked chromos on the walls.
Then he thought, of course, of the little cabinet in his mother's salon, back there in the castle of the Puys de Dôme; the little glass cabinet all filled with Tanagra statuettes, cups of Ming celadon, enamel from Norway, Meissen and Sèvres china, and boxes in Vernis-Martin.
Dry, lifeless things they were, representing so and so much money and so and so much skill and artis-
