Mr. Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself injured and misunderstood. He shut his eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand. “I _merely_ suggested,” he said, “that you protest _too_ much. You defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis by trying to be over-emphatic. All this _folie de grandeur_, all this hankering after _terribiltà_——” sagely Mr. Mercaptan shook his head, “it’s led so _many_ people astray. And, in any case, you can’t _really_ expect _me_ to find it very sympathetic.” Mr. Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and looked affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered. He looked at his magnificent sofa, gilded and carved, upholstered in white satin, and so deep—for it was a great square piece of furniture, almost as broad as it was long—that when you sat right back, you had of necessity to lift your feet from the floor and recline at length. It was under the white satin that Crébillon’s spirit found, in these late degenerate days, a sympathetic home. He looked at his exquisite Condor fans over the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls, pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic landscape amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs. He looked at his cabinet of _bibelots_ in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb Chinese phallus in sculptured rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with the Chelsea china, the little ivory Madonna, which might be a fake, but in any case was quite as good as any mediæval French original, and the Italian medals. He looked at his comical writing-desk in shining black papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the “Jus Primæ Noctis,” black and neat on the page, with the red corrections attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost invariable discovery of, the inevitable word. No, really, one couldn’t expect _him_ to find Lypiatt’s notions very sympathetic. “But I don’t expect you to,” said Lypiatt, “and, good God! I don’t want you to. But you call me insincere. That’s what I can’t and won’t stand. How dare you do that?” His voice was growing louder. Once more Mr. Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped. “At the most,” he corrected, “I said that there was a certain look of insincerity about some of the pictures. Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this kind.”