But these details have small bearing on the story I am relating. To resume: Driven out, in spite of the stormy weather, by the cheerlessness of my room, I hastened on the Saturday evening in question to seek the warm and comforting shelter of Mrs. Marcellus's abode. All was as serene within that model home as if the raging elements themselves had been subdued by the grand white hands of Mrs. Marcellus, and at her order had been stuffed with eiderdown and covered with yellow satin by a Paris upholsterer. How soothing to the rasped nerves was this interior--the crackling fire, the lights, the flowers, the soft rays from the lamp falling on the gray silk dress and the lace headdress of Mrs. Marcellus as she sat at the solid, large round centre-table with a basket of gay-colored embroidery-silks before her! Besides myself there were five visitors, all gentlemen of course, and most of them individuals who are not much given to loquacity. The lack of conversation was somewhat marked. Still, no one felt any obligation to keep the ball of small talk rolling. Mrs. Marcellus says that when people come to see her she wants them to converse or to keep silent as the spirit moves. The wings of silence brooded over this gathering again and again, yet no one felt guilty. There were many pleasant and home-like sounds--the tintinnabulation of the teaspoons and sugar-tongs, the pricking of the needle through the stiff linen, the whirl of a book-leaf, the laying down of card upon card in the game of solitaire which some one was playing, the bloodless execution of a paper-knife cutting apart the sheets of a newly-arrived magazine, the rustling of the Saturday's local paper, delivered just at dusk and not opened till now, the fresh ink made doubly pungent in the warm atmosphere till it yielded to the pressure of the summer-like temperature and dried up--like the rest of us. "It is odd," said Henry L. Thompkins at length, closing a novel which he had been reading by slow instalments at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays for the last year at least, and whose finis he had now reached, "that so many authors write love-stories." "Why shouldn't they," said Mrs. Marcellus, "when so many readers like to peruse them?" "Who likes to peruse them?" "Why, you do, I should think, else you would have laid down that book long ago. You've been perfectly absorbed in it: there have been chapters which made your color come and go with their exciting interest. I've watched you;" and she shook her needle at him accusingly.