"Jeannette, Jeannette!" he said the name over to himself time and again. It brought the image of her before him more plainly than ever. The sunset glint in her hair, the roses and lilies of her skin, the melody in her voice! The charm with which she had first met him, in that very shop. It all came to him keenly. The more remote the possibility of his gaining her seemed, the more he hugged the thought of her. He admitted to himself now, all the more since his excursion into an abominable side of human nature, that she was the most unspoilt creature in his world. A girl with that face, that hair, that wit, was sure to be of a charm that could never lose its flavor; the allurement of her was a thing that could never die. Nothing but thoughts of this girl came to him on the way to his rooms. Once in his own place, he felt that his reflections on Miss Vanlief had served him as a tonic. He felt an energy once more, a vigor, a desire for action. In that mood he turned fiercely upon some of the drawings on his walls. He called Nevins, and had a heap made of the things that now filled him with loathing. "All of the Beardsleys must come down," he ordered. "No; not all. The portrait of Mantegna may stay. That has nobility; the others have the genius of hidden evil. They take too much of the trapping from our horrible human nature. The funeral procession by Willette may hang; his Montmartre things are trivially indecent. Heine and his grotesqueries may stay in jail for all I care. Leave one or two of Thoeny's blue dragoons. Leandre's crowned heads will do me no harm; I can see past their cruelties. But take the Gibsons away; they are relegated to the matinee girl. What is to be done with them? Really, Nevins, don't worry me about such things. Sell them, give them, lose them: I don't care. There's only one man in the world who'd really adore them, and he--" he clenched his hands as he thought of Hart,--"he is a worm, a worm that dieth and yet corrupts everything about him." He sat down, when this clearance was over, and wrote a rather long letter to Professor Vanlief. He told as much as he could bring himself to tell of the result of the experiment. He begged the Professor, knowing the circumstances as no other did, to do what was possible to reinstate him, Vane, in the esteem of Miss Vanlief. As to whether he meant to go on with further experiments; he had not yet made up his mind. There were consequences, obligations, following on this clear reading of other men's souls, that he had not counted upon. CHAPTER IX. To cotton-batting and similar unromantic staples the great house of R.S. Neargood & Co. first owed the prosperity that later developed into world-wide fame. It was success in cotton-batting that enabled the firm to make those speculations that eventually placed millions to its credit, and familiarized the Bourse and Threadneedle Street with its name.