Had René in fancy painted any setting for this rare and majestic beauty, he could have imagined no other than that in which he saw Madame Moraines for the second time. She was seated at her writing-desk, on which stood a lighted lamp covered with a lace shade, whilst an ivy plant trained to creep along a gilded trellis formed a novel and pleasing screen to the table. The small room was filled with a profusion of ornaments and trifles indispensable to every modern interior. The inevitable reclining-chair, with its heap of cushions, the whatnot crowded with Japanese _netsukés_, the photographs in their frames of filigree, the three or four _genre_ pictures, the lacquered boxes standing on the little table covered with its strip of Oriental silk, the flowers distributed here and there--who in Paris is unacquainted with this refinement of comfort now so stereotyped as to be quite commonplace? But all that René knew of Society life he had learnt either from Balzac and other novelists of fifty years ago or from more modern authors who had never seen the inside of a drawing-room; the _ensemble_ of this apartment, beautifully harmonised by the soft tints of the shaded lamp, was therefore to him like the revelation of a hidden trait peculiar to the woman who had presided over its arrangement. The charm of the moment was the more irresistible since the Madonna who dwelt in this shrine, with its subdued light and its warm air heavy with the scent of flowers, received him with a smile and a look in her eyes that at once dispelled all his childish fears.