St. George was in his shirt-sleeves in the middle of a large high room—a room without windows, but with a wide skylight at the top, that of a place of exhibition. It was furnished as a library, and the serried bookshelves rose to the ceiling, a surface of incomparable tone produced by dimly-gilt “backs” interrupted here and there by the suspension of old prints and drawings. At the end furthest from the door of admission was a tall desk, of great extent, at which the person using it could write only in the erect posture of a clerk in a counting-house; and stretched from the entrance to this structure was a wide plain band of crimson cloth, as straight as a garden-path and almost as long, where, in his mind’s eye, Paul at once beheld the Master pace to and fro during vexed hours—hours, that is, of admirable composition. The servant gave him a coat, an old jacket with a hang of experience, from a cupboard in the wall, retiring afterwards with the garment he had taken off. Paul Overt welcomed the coat; it was a coat for talk, it promised confidences—having visibly received so many—and had tragic literary elbows. “Ah we’re practical—we’re practical!” St. George said as he saw his visitor look the place over. “Isn’t it a good big cage for going round and round? My wife invented it and she locks me up here every morning.” Our young man breathed—by way of tribute—with a certain oppression. “You don’t miss a window—a place to look out?” “I did at first awfully; but her calculation was just. It saves time, it has saved me many months in these ten years. Here I stand, under the eye of day—in London of course, very often, it’s rather a bleared old eye—walled in to my trade. I can’t get away—so the room’s a fine lesson in concentration. I’ve learnt the lesson, I think; look at that big bundle of proof and acknowledge it.” He pointed to a fat roll of papers, on one of the tables, which had not been undone. “Are you bringing out another—?” Paul asked in a tone the fond deficiencies of which he didn’t recognise till his companion burst out laughing, and indeed scarce even then. “You humbug, you humbug!”—St. George appeared to enjoy caressing him, as it were, with that opprobrium. “Don’t I know what you think of them?” he asked, standing there with his hands in his pockets and with a new kind of smile. It was as if he were going to let his young votary see him all now. “Upon my word in that case you know more than I do!” the latter ventured to respond, revealing a part of the torment of being able neither clearly to esteem nor distinctly to renounce him.