Remembering her mother’s love of old French furniture, she haunted auction-rooms and picked up a set of eight pieces covered with tapestry framed in wood painted black and decorated with gilt bow-knots; which, the auctioneer assured his public, had once graced a château in Brittany. At all events it graced the big drawing-room in West Twelfth Street, and, mindful of man’s love of comfort, she had a large davenport and several easy chairs made that harmonized in color if not in dubious antiquity. The rug was black velvet, the walls were pale gray, and hung eventually with odd old landscapes painted by long-forgotten artists for former Bylants and Carterets. Singly they were caricatures of art, but together, and monopolizing the field, they completed the atmosphere of lightness and charm, and this room also faced south. Bylant, who was about to re-lease his house in Albany, reserved the dining-room furniture; his family silver, long stored, was little inferior to that of Carteret manor, and included Dutch pieces brought to the settlement from Holland in the early seventeenth century. The chairs were Jacobean and a Knickerbocker Kas served as a sideboard and for the display of the larger pieces of silver. He also sent for two fine tapestries; and hoped that his prosperous brothers in art with fashionable socialist tendencies would not cut him. His own chambers had been comfortable but severe, and so was his refuge under the roof. The narrow hall was painted white and furnished only with a high wide chair made in Connecticut in the seventeenth century, from the Flemish pattern, and an English ecclesiastical chest. Gita had been so absorbed in this furnishing of her city home, and in the fulfillment of an old day-dream, that she barely remembered she was to occupy the house with a canonical husband, and Bylant was by no means blind to her attitude. He was impatient with himself when he recognized that he was seething with dull masculine resentment, and heroically made and remade an effort to adapt himself to his fantastic situation with philosophy, and trust to time and daily association to do its inevitable work. To be the sulky misused husband was no part of his program; but playing the rôle of sympathetic friend and intellectual partner under that narrow roof was a discouraging prospect to a highly organized nervous system, already overstrained by months of directing a naturally mobile temperament into channels of unbroken repose—during long hours on duty, at least—and acting the part of a sexless intelligence. He foresaw attacks of nervous irritability in the seclusion of his fortress upstairs. CHAPTER XXI