Heron occupied two or three rooms on the drawing-room floor of one of the streets running out of Piccadilly. He paid, perhaps, more for his accommodation than a prudent young man beginning the world all over again would have thought necessary; but Heron could not come down all at one step from his dignity as a sort of colonial governor, and he considered it, in a manner, due to the honor of England's administrative system, that he should maintain a gentlemanlike appearance in London while still engaged in fighting his battle--the battle which had not begun yet. Besides, as he had himself told Minola Grey, his troubles thus far were not money troubles. He had means enough to live like a modest gentleman even in London, provided he did not run into extravagant tastes of any kind, and he had saved, because he had had no means of spending it, a good deal of his salary while in the St. Xavier's his lodgings; and his condition seemed to Blanchet, when they entered the drawing-room together, and the servant was seen to be quietly busy in anticipating his master's wants, to be that of an easy opulence whereof, in the case of young bachelors, he had little personal knowledge. It was very impressive for the moment. Genius, and originality, and the school quailed at first before respectability, West End rooms, and a man servant. The adornments of the rooms were, to Mr. Blanchet's thinking, atrocious. They were, indeed, only of the better class London lodgings style: mirrors, and gilt, and white, and damask. There were doors where there ought to have been curtains, carpets where artistic feeling would have prescribed mats or rugs; there were no fans, not to say on the ceiling, but even on the walls. The only suggestion of art in the place was a plaster cast of the Venus of the Louvre which Heron himself had bought, and which in all simplicity he adored. Mr. Blanchet held, first, that all casts were nefarious, and next, that the Venus of Milo as a work of art was beneath contempt. One of the divinities of his school had done the only Venus which art could acknowledge as her own. This was, to be sure, a picture, not a statue; but in Mr. Blanchet's mind it had settled the Venus question for ever. The Lady Venus was draped from chin to toes in a snuff-colored gown, and was represented as seated on a rock biting the nails of a lank, greenish hand; and she had sunken cheeks, livid eyes, and a complexion like that of the prairie sage grass. Any other Venus made Herbert Blanchet shudder.