First and foremost, there were books; books on shelves, on the table, books everywhere. And they were not best sellers either, if one could judge by their plain heavy bindings. “Italian history,” she said, seeing him glance curiously at a title. “I take up wild fads from time to time, and read about nothing else until the subject is exhausted, or until I am! At present I spend my time in the company of the Medici!” He thought that she was the last woman on earth whom he would expect to care for such things, but that was to be the least of his surprises. All her books sounded one persistent note, romance, adventure, a passionate love for and yearning after the beautiful, the thrilling, the emotional in life. There were books of folklore and legends, medieval tales and modern essays on strange, far lands more full of color and wonder than ours. There were translations from different tongues, there were volumes full of Eastern myths, and others of sea tales and stories of the vast prairies and the Barbary Coast. There was not a single popular novel among them all. Every one was a treasure box of romance. The pictures which she had collected to adorn her rooms were equally self-revealing. They ranged from photographs and engravings to Japanese prints; more than one looked as though it had come from a colored supplement. Here, again, the message was invariably adventurous or romantic. Miss Templeton smiled as she saw her guest’s bewildered look. “It’s a queer assortment, isn’t it?” she said. “But I can’t stand the flat, polite-looking things that people pretend to admire. Things have to be alive, to _call_ me, somehow!” All at once, it seemed to Jim that he had the keynote to her character. It was vitality. She was superbly alive—with the vivid faults as well as the vivid advantages of intense life. Luncheon was served at once, and it proved almost as cosmopolitan in its items as the rest of Miss Templeton’s appurtenances. She had ordered soft-shell crabs to begin with, because she said that for the first twenty-five years of her life she had never had a chance to taste them, and now, since she could, she was making up for lost time, and ate them every day! With truly feminine logic, she had made her next course broiled ham and green corn, because she had been brought up on them in the Middle West. She had a new kind of salad she had recently heard of, solely because it _was_ new; and she finished with chocolate ice cream for the reason, as she explained, that chocolate ice cream had always been her idea of a party, and when she wanted to feel very grand, she made a point of having it.