He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color of stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden cupola, picked out in glass--green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim and soiled. A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let Tom in. “Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.” Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him. A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the boxed mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table, with its high unlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian bread, its platters of cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order was disturbed by its broken wreath of guests. Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun with their wine. “Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous space. “Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his other. A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s. Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him. “Well, Dounia--comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass. “I’ve no cigarettes.” Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands: gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips, the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face, the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse. A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared against the pale primness of his face. “Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun particularly needed, to-night.” This was Christian Hill--sedate, rebellious--a man of business who craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams. All his money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly. “I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder beside him. “Madeline--this is Mr. Rennard--Miss Gross.”