Hamoud, towering there in the attire of an Oman gentleman--which she took for a specially effective livery--contemplated the great Mrs. Brassfield. His full eyelids were dreamily lowered over his lustrous eyes. His long, straight nose seemed narrower than usual, perhaps from disdain. But his clear-cut carnelian mouth, vivid between his faint mustache and his delicate beard, did not change expression, although he was calling the great Mrs. Brassfield a female beneath the contempt of a Muscat slaver, the progeny of camels and alley dogs, and other names besides. As if regretfully he turned away to David Verne, measured out the solution of arsenic, and presented the goblet, a tapering treasure covered with gilt and crimson protuberances, an antique that had stood before men in the wave-lapped palaces of Venice, brimming with Greek wine, or maybe with Renaissance poison. David Verne himself raised the goblet. "Dr. Fallows has really done wonders, hasn't he?" "Wonders," Lilla echoed with a smile. In the hall, as she was leaving, Fanny Brassfield said to Lilla: "By the way, Anna Zanidov is in town. She was asking after you." Without moving, Lilla murmured slowly: "Ah, she wants to tell my fortune again, perhaps?" "She stopped doing that. It got too uncanny. You know yourself that everything she ever predicted came to pass. Including three deaths; that is, two besides----" "One must believe that she sees it," Lilla assented, and, frozen by her thoughts, shuddered violently. "Yes, too uncanny! She did well to give it up." "Especially as people were getting to be afraid of her," said Fanny Brassfield, while passing through the front doorway. CHAPTER XXXVI While David worked behind the closed doors of the study, Lilla, sitting down in a damask-covered chair, tried to concentrate her mind on the new books from New York. She skimmed the novels to the point where the lovers had their first embrace, then turned to poems by women, which were pervaded with a melancholy derived perhaps from disillusionment. As a corrective she read the books on world politics, economics, esthetic philosophy. In these last she found, eloquently expressed, the most characteristic argument of the times--a persuasion to that self-abandonment which follows materialism and moral skepticism, an announcement that happiness lay in a religion of the senses, in becoming, indeed, "divinely animal." As she laid down the book, there returned to her the words that a young Roman had poured into her ears one night on Lake Como: "The splendors of this world and our acceptance of them. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand generations have made so complex."