"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to Paris and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from there--letters I had fixed up in forged handwriting. I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has brought me to. Failing crops, hands discharged one by one, place falling to ruin, and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody will come around here after dark nowadays--or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you must be a stranger. "And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked first--and that changed everything. "No--there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant. "Denis had been right--it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry, and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his inmost genius. "The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings--stunned me before I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond her. "Of course she was in it--was the key to it, in a sense--but her figure only formed one point in a vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web of hair spun around her, and was half seated, half reclining on a sort of bench or divan, carved in patterns unlike those of any known decorative tradition. There was a monstrously shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid whose color I haven't been able to place or classify to this day. "The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort of scene I ever saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all being a kind of emanation from the woman's brain; yet there was also a directly opposite suggestion--as if she were just an evil image or hallucination conjured up by the scene itself.