The building looked very dismal to me, I recall. A forlorn place it seemed to receive the great guest. It had been a dormitory once, which had been given over, owing to the inconveniences of the location, to accommodate unmarried teachers. It was more like a refined factory than an apartment-house. The high stoop had no railing, and the pebbles which collected on the coarse granite steps added to the general bleakness of the entrance. The inner halls were grim, with plain match-board wainscots and dingy paint, and narrow staircases that ascended steeply from meager landings. Miss Haviland’s suite was three flights up. But when I got inside it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Her door was slightly ajar—it was the way Miss Haviland avoided the bother and the squalor of having to let people in—and at my knock she called out in a restrained, serene tone, “Come!” And I stepped through the tiny vestibule into the study. It was amazingly attractive—Hurrell Oaks himself would have remarked it, I’ll wager. Nobody except Marian Haviland could have wrought such a change. Of course there were Mrs. Edgerton’s Monet, and Mrs. Braxton’s brocades, and—yes—Mrs. Green’s fur rug, to say nothing of numberless other borrowed _objets_, to help out the lavishness of the effect; but the synthesis was magnificent. Everything looked as if it had grown there. One might have been in an Italian palace. And Miss Haviland, seated at her new antique walnut desk with the ormolu mounts, looked veritably like a chatelaine. She had always, too—I ought to have seen it before—a little resembled a chatelaine, a chatelaine without a castle. But she had for the moment her castle now—enough of it to complete the picture, at any rate. There was a low smoldering fire on the hearth, and the breeze that played through the open window just swayed the heavy damask hangings rhythmically. My samovar, as I set it down on a carved consol near the door, looked too crude and crass to warrant the excuse of my coming. She read my dazed approval in a glance and laid down her pen, and, with one experienced _coup d’œil_ over the manuscript before her, leaned back, clasping the edge of her desk with both hands and staring at me. She was wearing one of those black evening gowns, and a feather fan was in easy reach of where she sat; and I noticed all at once that the string of pearls was dangling from the gas-jet above her head. “The new fixtures—the electric ones—will be bronze,” she hastened to say.