His visit to the library, where the smell of old leather bindings added to the deadness of the air, nearly finished him. He went out on to the corridor, and paced the length of it, past the flying staircase of black oak leading to the upper corridor, and back again. A broad strip of deep-pile, crimson carpet was spread along the centre of the polished floor. On one hand, between the doors of the living-rooms, hung a collection of valuable copper-plate engravings, representing classic ruins in Italy and Greece. While on the other, in the spaces between the windows, were ranged a series of busts--Augustus, Tiberias, Nero, the two Antonines, Caligula, and Commodus--set on tall columnar pedestals of dark green or yellow marble. The blind, sculptured faces deepened the general sense of oppression by their rigidity, their unalterable and somewhat scornful repose. Out of doors the March morning was tumultuous with wind and wet, offering marked contrast to the dry heat, the almost burdensome order and stillness reigning within. The air of the corridor was perhaps a degree fresher than that of the library he had just quitted. Laurence leaned his arms on a stone window-sill, and glanced in a desultory way at the day's _Times_, which he had picked up off the hall table in passing. But Chinese railway concessions, plague reports from Bombay, even the last racing fixtures, or rumours of fighting on the North-West Indian Frontier, failed to arouse his interest. In his present humour, these items of news from the outside world seemed curiously unimportant and remote. He stared at the wide, well-wooded, rain-blurred landscape. The scene at which he had assisted last night, the intimate drama moving forward relentlessly even now to its close in that well-appointed room upstairs--and the extraordinary character of the chief actor in that drama--his over-stimulated brain and atrophied affections, his greed of experiment and of acquiring information, even yet, in the very article of death--depressed Laurence's imagination as the close atmosphere depressed his body. It was all so painfully narrow, barren, hungry, joyless, somehow. And meanwhile, he, Laurence, was required to play the fool--not for the provocation of laughter, which would after all have had a semblance of cheerful good-fellowship in it. But in cold blood, as an object lesson in the manner and customs of the average man; a lesson the result of which would be tabulated and pigeon-holed by that unwearying intelligence, as might be the habits of some species of obscure, unpleasant insect. The young man had developed slight intolerance of the exclusively worldly side of things lately. It seemed by no means improbable he might develop equal intolerance of the exclusively intellectual side before long, at this rate.