The arm-chairs were upholstered in pink satin. On one of them was a long fawn-coloured tailor-made coat, hanging collar downwards over the back. A handful of silver and a tiny gun-metal cigarette case had dropped out of a pocket on to the seat of the chair. The whole place reeked with a well-known perfume--an evil, sickly smell of ripe lilies and the acrid smoke of Egyptian tobacco. A frilled dressing jacket covered with yellowish lace lay in a tumbled heap upon the hearth-rug. The room would have struck an ordinary visitor with a sense of nausea almost like a physical blow. There was something sordidly shameless about it. The vulgarest and most material of Circes held sway among all this gaudy and lavish disorder. The most sober-living and innocent-minded man, brought suddenly into such a place, would have known it instantly for what it was, and turned to fly as from a pestilence. A week or two before, a picture of this den had appeared in one of the illustrated papers. Underneath the photograph had been printed-- "THE BOUDOIR OF ONE OF LONDON'S POPULAR FAVOURITES. MISS GERTRUDE HUNT AT HOME." Below had been another picture--"Miss Hunt in her new motor-car." Robert Llwellyn had paid four hundred pounds for the machine. The big man seemed to fit into these surroundings as a hand into a glove. In his room at the Museum, on a platform at the Royal Society, his intellect always animated his face. In such places his personality was eminent, as his work also. Here he was changed. Silenus was twin to him; he sniffed the perfume with pleasure; he stretched himself to the heat and warmth like a great cat. He was an integral part of the _mise-en-scène_--lost, and arrogant of his degradation. A key clicked in the lock, there was a rustling of silk, and Gertrude Hunt swept into the room. "So you're come to time, then," she said in a deep, musical voice, but spoilt by an unpleasing Cockney twang. "I'm dead tired. The theatre was crammed; I had to sing the _Coon of Coons_ twice. Get me a brandy-and-soda, Bob. There's a good boy--the decanter's in the sideboard." She threw off her long cloak and sank into a chair. The sticky grease-paint of the theatre had hardly been removed. She looked, as she said, worn out. They chatted for a few moments on indifferent subjects, and she lit a cigarette. When she took it from her lips, Llwellyn noticed that the end was crimsoned by the paint upon them. "Well," she said at length, "somehow or other you must pay those bills I sent on to you. They _must_ be paid. I can't do it. I'm only getting twenty-five pounds from the theatre now, and that's just about enough to pay my drink bill!" Llwellyn's face clouded. "I'm just about at my last gasp myself," he said. "I'm threatened with bankruptcy as it is."