His own room, revealed now in its homely contour and its still homelier furnishings, was neat enough, with Jeff's ideas of neatness, but all about it indubitably betrayed the fact that only male hands cared for it. The tall black-walnut bureau lacked a cover for its top; the mantel was littered with cigar boxes and old law reports; the dead asparagus ferns, banked in the grate, were faded to a musty yellow; and some of the fronds had fallen out across the hearth so that remotely the fireplace suggested the mouth of a big cow choking on an overly large bite of dried hay. In places the matting on the floor was frayed almost through. Just from the careless skew of the coverlid and the set of the pillows against the white bolster, you would have known at a glance that a man had made up the bed that morning. Barring one picture the walls were bare. This lone picture hung in a space between the two front windows, right where the occupant of the room, if so minded, might look at it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. Beyond any doubt a lover of the truly refined in art would have looked at it with a shudder, for it was one of those crayon portraits--a crayon portrait done in the most crayonsome and grewsome style of a self-taught artist working by the day rather than by the piece. Plainly it had been enlarged, as the trade term goes, from a photograph; the enlarger thereof had been lavish with his black leads; that, too, was self-evident. The original photographer had done his worst with the subject; the retoucher had gone him one better. It was a likeness--you might call it a likeness--of a woman dressed in the abominable style of the late seventies--with heavy bangs down in her eyes, and a tight-fitting basque with enormous sleeves, and long pendent eardrops in her ears. The artist, whoever he was, had striven masterfully to rob the likeness of all expression. There alone his craftsmanship had failed him. For even he had not altogether taken away from the face a certain suggestion of old-fashioned wistfulness and sweetness. In all other regards, though, he had had his reckless way with it. The eyes were black and staring, the lines of the figure stiff and artificial, and the background for the head was a pastel nightmare.