"At last you have arrived. Through an interminable progression of hours I have waited, the days and nights mixing themselves into one abominable salad of expectation, disappointment, rage against those whom I pictured as interfering to detain you; and, as dressing and sauce to the whole infernal compound, a yearning for the assuaging repose of your presence which gnawed, like the undying worm, at my entrails."
This address, although delivered in the young man's accustomed unemotional manner, with studied, carefully modulated utterance, was hardly calculated to allay the embarrassment or disquietude aroused by the uncompromising stare of the concierge, and very evident, though more deferential, curiosity of Giovanni, the bright-eyed, velvet-spoken Italian man-servant who admitted her.
Nor were other sources of discomfort lacking. Madame St. Leger, like all persons of temperament, in whom mind and body, the soul and senses, are constantly and actively interpenetrative, instinctively responded to the spiritual influences which reside in places and even in material objects. Now, coming directly into it from the glitter and movement, the thousand and one very articulate activities of the sun-bathed city, the vivid foliage of whose many trees tossed in the crisp freshness of the summer wind, René Dax's studio struck her as the strangest and, perhaps, most repellant human habitation she had ever yet set foot in. Struck her, too, as belonging to a section of that exclusively man's world, in which woman's part is at once fugitive and not a little suspect.
The black hangings and furniture stared at, the bare immaculately white walls bluffed, her. Only a mournful travesty of the splendid daylight, reigning out of doors, filtered down through the gathered black-stuff blinds drawn across the great, sloping skylights, and contended languidly against the harsh clarity of a couple of electric lights--with flat smoked-glass shades to them--hanging, spider-like, at the end of long black cords from the beam supporting the central span of the arched ceiling. Notwithstanding the height of the room and its largeness of area, the atmosphere was stagnant, listless, and dead. This constituted Madame St. Leger's initial impression. This, and a singular persuasion--returning upon her stealthily, persistently, though she strove honestly to cast it out--that the studio, although apparently so bare and empty, was, in point of fact, crowded by forms and conceptions the reverse of wholesome or ennobling, which pushed upon and jostled her, while, by their number and grossness, they further exhausted the already lifeless air.