Tom had two rooms in Studio Building, opening into each other by folding doors, which were never known to be shut. The walls were hung with old French tapestry, its rich, soft colors harmonizing exquisitely with some dull-red velvet draperies from Venice. Bits of armor, some of them very splendid, were disposed here and there, while a wealth of _bric-à-brac_ enriched every nook and corner. In the doorway hung an old altar-lamp of silver, with a cup of ruby glass, and from various points depended other lamps of Moresque and antique shapes. A pair of tall brass flambeau-stands, spoil of a Belgian cathedral sacked a couple of centuries ago, upheld the heaviest candles Tom had been able to find, which smoked and flared most picturesquely. Bently had traveled widely, every where picking up graceful and artistic trifles--stuffs from Algiers; rugs from Persia and Turkey; weapons from Tripoli and India and Tunis; musical instruments from Egypt and Spain; antiques from Greece and Germany and Italy; and pottery from every where. His studio was the envy of all his brother artists, although he himself growled about it profanely, declaring that he had so much rubbish about him that he could not work, yet nevertheless declining to part with a single object. "I ought to clear the place out," he would say. "My pictures are getting to look like advertisements of an old clo' shop, and if a man doesn't change all his properties every year, the sapient critics say he has become mannered. But I can't let them go; or rather they won't let me go; they hang on like barnacles to an old hulk." The Pagans were six that night, Fenton's place being unfilled. The delinquency of the absent artist was a good deal commented upon, yet always as if an effort were made to keep the subject out of the conversation. It came up again and again, and that not unnaturally, since it was necessarily in every man's thoughts. "He's a mellifluous coward, now isn't he?" Bently remarked, with his usual picturesque disregard of the conventional use of words. "The average American couldn't have been more sneaking." "He was always afraid of the rough grain of life," Rangely responded. "I always told him he was a born coward. He could never serve any cause that wouldn't give him a uniform of broadcloth. But he was born for something better than tagging after Calvin and his tribe, heaven knows." "Bah!" went on Bently, "the bad taste of it! I could get over every thing else, but the bad taste of proving a sneak, and giving up every thing worth while." Somebody threw in a quotation from Browning's _Lost Leader_, and then Grant Herman, trying to turn the conversation, took up Bently's remark.