"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing
his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."
He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the
bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the
trouser-presses--all the complex simplifications of the
millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the
expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I
really don't see how people manage to live without that."
Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he
was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been through,
and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming, so
disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your
leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your
work!"
But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected
check.
"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at
the end of the florid vista.
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