The room which Moselle came storming across seemed to have been originally three rooms, but the partitions had been mainly cut away. There were two pianos, and two grates for coal fires. Floor and chairs and tables were a welter of sheet-music, beer-bottles, steins, books, flower-pots, cats, pipes, newspapers, and rumpled rugs. Moselle came through it like a loose meteor, bent on breaking chaos into smaller fragments; hair brushed back and yellowish, dingy with age, eyebrows and mustache that swelled and dropped like cataracts, weight to threaten floors, huge, fat fist, and porcelain pipe in mouth. He hugged Gard to his mighty belly, muttered and puffed hoarsely, and pulled him across the room to where a man in black had risen from his chair, who had a long jaw and aggressive chin, shaven bluish, a slouched hat on his head, a frock-coat, and was tall, gaunt and bony. He held out his hand. "I'm glad to know you, Mr. Windham," he said, in a deep, drawling voice, with a certain winningness of smile. "'Tis Shack Mavering. He knows about you, _kleiner_," cried Moselle, boisterous, explanatory. "'Tis a friend of Mephisto, der Faust-devil, und of me. Ha! Sit down. Vat iss dat?" pointing to Gard's bundle. Gard dropped his bundle beside his chair. At the brotherhood was orderly calm, thoughtful silence, cool, clear walls, and whispering sound of slippered feet. Moselle at organ lessons in Trinity had never seemed so loose and free, broad, joyous, unlimited. Somehow Gard felt as if vacant spaces about his soul were growing warm and inhabited. He laughed, and knew no reason for it. "I've left the brotherhood. I'm going to be--" "Gott! Vat you going to be?" Gard laughed again. "I thought you might know, and if you did you'd be sure to tell me." "So!" Moselle's face, when it dropped vivacity and took on gravity, fell into rugged, powerful lines. "Got no money?" "No." "Nor clothes of a human too much, nor plans, nor friends but old Fritz, nor knowledge of perversity? Good! All good! You will stay mit old Fritz some veek or more, und I vill get you a church-organ to play somevere. Good! _Hein?_ Shplendid! Shack!"--gesticulating over Gard--"look you at his head, his eyelid, his shape of der hair-line. Vat? It is super-sensuous Florentine, und de back of his head is Yankee, und so hard you not break him mit an axe. I say in all human variety is law, und device, und chain of causes, und you are mitout science to know not music itself haf more severe und mathematic system. Dat boy is at de end of his shtring of causes--at de end of his shtring. Ha!" "End of his rope is the idiom," said Mavering, in solemn bass. "It means he's down on his uppers. You'd better attend to me and learn pure English. Your English is composite, mistaken, and slangy, and you are, in body and mind, an epitome of gross fatness, whom no science of human variety could classify."