Redwood's place was just below Fourteenth Street, on Fourth Avenue. The house had formerly been a dwelling-house. In the process of its degeneracy, it had most likely passed through the boarding-house stage. At present it was given over without reserve to commerce. A German drinking-shop occupied the basement, impregnating the air round about with a smell of stale lager beer. Redwood used the parlors--large, lofty apartments, with paneled walls and frescoed ceilings--and the floors above. The frescoes, of course, dated from the dwelling-house epoch. Their hues were sadly faded. Here and there, in patches, the paint had peeled off. Three pallid cupids, wretchedly out of drawing, floated around the plaster medallion from which the gas fixture depended. Elias never entered here without thinking of the curious secrets those cupids might have whispered, if they had been empowered to open their painted lips. What scenes of joy and sorrow had they not looked down upon in the past? Merry-makers had danced beneath them; women had wept beneath them; lovers had wooed their mistresses beneath them; what else? The intimate inner life of a family, of a home, had gone on beneath them. How many domestic quarrels had they watched? How many weddings? How many funerals? What strange stories had they not overheard? Of what strange doings had they not been mute witnesses? Between the windows stood a tall pier-glass. Its gilt frame was chipped and tarnished. A milky film, like that which obscures the eyes of an aged man, had gathered over its surface. The quicksilver was veined, like a leaf. It had a very knowing look, this ancient mirror, as though, if it had chosen, it could have startled you with ghostly effigies of the forms and faces that it had reflected in by-gone years. Elias Bacharach, who enjoyed having his fancy stirred, was always glad of an excuse to drop in at Redwood's. Elias climbed Redwood's stoop, and opened the door. It had been dark enough outside. Inside it was darker still. It took a little while for Elias's eyesight to accommodate itself to the change. Then the first object of which it became conscious was the sere and yellow pier-glass between the windows. Far in its mottled depths--down, that is to say, at the remotest and darkest end of the room--he saw Matthew Redwood, the costumer, in conversation with a young girl. The young girl's face, a spot of light amid the surrounding shadows, had an instantaneous and magnetic effect upon Elias Bacharach's gaze. He quite forgot his old friends, the cupids. Turning about, and drawing as near to the couple as discretion would warrant, he made the young girl the victim of a fixed, eager stare.