"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to Granger:--'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out some one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--' The fact is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this room in the daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people. You ought to have been here at the _bal poudre_ I gave last season--lots of pretty girls in laces and brocades, and powder on their hair. It was a lovely sight.... Come; we've had enough of this." Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis Quinze splendor. "The next thing will be something else." Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment. "This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my distinguished guests." "Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's 'Alhambra' by heart. "Only it isn't Moorish; it's Baroque--and a very good example." The room had a heavy paneled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners, half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment, broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is Baroque all over." "See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly, "are you the woman who read about the 'Decadence of the Renaissance Forms' at the last Fortnightly?" "I'm the woman," responded Jane modestly. "I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind that day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something--or so we thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear--well, it just made me blue. You didn't notice it?" "I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there." "Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to it; it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then--you think them corrupt and degraded?" "Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later forms are interesting from a historical and sociological point of view. And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter." Jane slid over these big words with a practiced ease.