Incongruous enough on the Pinturicchio table, and as if she had dared to walk where mere moderns feared to tread, a polychrome framed picture of Miss Bleema Pelz, tulle-clouded, piquant profile flung charmingly to the northwest, and one bare shoulder prettily defiled with a long screw-curl, lit, as it were, into the careful gloom. Deliberately in range of that photograph, and so beatific of gaze that it was as if his sense were soaked in its loveliness, Mr. Feist smiled, and, smiling, reddened. Enter then Mrs. Pelz, hitting softly into white taffetas beneath the black lace; Mr. Pelz, wide, white and boiled of shirt-front. "Good evening, Mr. Feist! It's a shame the way we kept you waiting." "Not at all, Mrs. Pelz--a pleasure. Hello! how's my friend, the picture king?" "Rotten," said Mr. Pelz, amiably, shaking hands with a great riding-up of cuff, and seating himself astride a Florentine bench and the leather-embossed arms of the Strozzi family. "Roody, what a way to sit!" "'What a way to sit,' she tells me. I'd like to see a fellow sit any way in this room without making a monkey of himself. Am I right, Feist? The Eyetalians maybe didn't know no better, but I should have to suffer, too, when for four-seventy-nine I can buy myself at Tracy's the finest kind of a rocking-chair that fits me." "Roody!" "Say, Feist agrees with me; only, he don't know you well enough yet to let on. I notice that with all his Louis-this and Louis-that rooms in his own house, up in his own room it is a good old Uncle Sam's cot and a patent rocker." "You've got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz." "Gorgeous for a funeral." "Every collector in the country knows that table. I had my eye on it for my music-room once myself when it was shown at Dunlap's." "Dunlap's are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I'm having them do Grismer, too." "Well, Feist, how does it feel to have us for neighbors?" "Immense, Pelz!" "Like I said to my husband, between us the way the estates adjoin, we got a monopoly on Long Island--ain't it so?" "And believe me, Mrs. Pelz, you'll never regret the buy. The finest pleasure my money brought me yet is that view of my little bedroom I took you up to, Pelz." "Wonderful!" "I've got an outlook there, Mrs. Pelz, is a paradise to see. You can have all my forty-two rooms and two garages if you'll leave me my little top room with its miles of beautiful greenness, and--and so--so much beauty that--that it gets you by the throat. I--don't express it the way I see it, but--" "I should say so, Mr. Feist! Out of every one of our thirty-four rooms and eighteen baths you can see a regular oil-painting." Mr. Pelz leaned over, tongue in cheek and, at the screwing noise again, poking Mr. Feist in the region of the fifth rib. "She said to me up-stairs just now, Feist, 'Like we was used to it from home?' Eh? C-c-c-cluck! Eighteen baths a day! I know the time when one every Saturday night was stuck up." "Roody, honest, you're awful!"