Under the pressure of his insistent temperament, Michael found his collection of statuettes and ecclesiastical bric-à-brac very depressing. As a youth of the Florentine Renaissance he could not congratulate himself upon his room, which was much too much unlike either a Carpaccio interior or an Aubrey Beardsley bedroom. Between these two his ambition wavered. One by one the statuettes were moved to the top of a wardrobe where for a while they huddled, a dusty and devoted crowd, until one by one they met martyrdom at the hands of the housemaid. In their place appeared Della Robbia reliefs and terra-cotta statuettes of this or that famous Greek youth. The muscular and tearful pictures of Guido Reni, the bland insipidities of Bouguereau soon followed the statuettes, meeting a comparable martyrdom by being hung in the servants’ bedroom. The walls of Michael’s room were papered with a brown paper, which was intended to be very artistic, but was really merely sad. It was lightened, however, by various daring pictures in black and red that after only a very short regard really did take shape as scenes of Montmartre. There were landscapes of the Sussex downs, with a slight atmosphere of Japan and landscapes of Japan that were not at all like Japan, but none the less beautiful for that. The books of devotion were banished to the company of superannuated Latin and Greek textbooks on the lower shelf of a cupboard in the morning-room, whose upper shelf was stacked with tinned fruits. Incense was still burnt, not as once to induce prayers to ascend, but to stupefy Michael with scent and warmth into an imitation of a drug-taker’s listless paradise. This condition was accentuated by erecting over the head of his bed a canopy of faded green satin, which gave him acute æsthetic pleasure, until one night it collapsed upon him in the middle of the night. Every piece of upholstery in the room was covered with art linens that with the marching years had ousted the art muslins of Michael’s childhood. He also covered with squares of the same material the gas brackets, pushing them back against the wall and relying for light upon candles only. Notwithstanding Wilmot’s talk about literature, the influence of Wilmot’s friends was too strong, and Michael could not resist the deckle-edges of negligible poets. As these were expensive, Michael’s library lacked scope, and he himself, reflecting his pastime, came to believe in the bitterness and sweetness and bitter-sweetness of the plaintive sinners who printed so elegantly on such permanent paper the versification of their irregularity.