The lady's wonderful velvet train dragged listlessly behind her. Her neck and arms were dressed in heavy yellowish lace, but all around her slim body waves of deep colored, soft velvet held the light in lustrous pools or darkened into almost black shadows. It was like stained glass in a church, thought Caroline, stroking it surreptitiously, and like stained glass, too, were the lovely books, bloody red, grassy green and brown, like Autumn woods, with edges of gold when the sunlight struck them. They made the walls like a great jewelled cabinet, lined from floor to ceiling: here and there a niche of polished wood held a white, clear-cut head. From the ceiling great opal tinted globes swung on dull brass chains; they swayed ever so slightly when one watched them closely. "This is my favorite room, Duchess," said Caroline, "isn't it yours?" "Do you really think I look like one?" returned the lady, "the only duchess I ever saw was fat--horribly fat. It is a very handsome library, of course." "Then _she_ didn't look like a duchess, that's all," Caroline explained. "What I like about this library is, it's so clean. And you can pull the chairs out and show those big, shiny yellow ones on the bottom shelf." "Of course; why not?" said the Duchess, dropping into a great carved chair with griffins' heads on the top. "Why, you can't do that at Uncle Joe's," Caroline confided, sitting on a small griffin stool at the lady's feet, "because General gets at the bottom row and smears 'em. You see he's only two, and you can't blame him, but he licks himself dreadfully and then rubs it on the backs. He marks them, too, inside, with a pencil or a hatpin, or even an orange-wood stick that you clean your nails with. Yours is made of pearl, you know, but most--a great many, I mean--people have them wood. And so the chairs have to be all leaned around against the walls to keep him from the books." The Duchess drew a long breath. "And your uncle objects?" she said, between her teeth. "Uncle Joe says," Caroline returned, patting the griffin heads on her little stool, "that if the President had General in his library for half an hour he'd feel different about race suicide." The Duchess laughed shortly. "That is possible, too," she agreed. "You said Cousin Joe was well--and Edith?" "Oh, yes, they're well--I mean, they're very well indeed, thank you," said Caroline. "Uncle Joe says they have to be, with the General's shoes two dollars and a half a pair! You see he has quite thick soles, now--he runs about everywhere. Aunt Edith says he needs a mounted policeman 'stead of a nurse." "Did Edith get rested after the moving?" "Oh, yes," Caroline answered absently. She was watching the opal globes sway. "Aunt Edith says before she was married she'd have gone South with a trained nurse after such an experience, but now she has to save the nurse for measles, she s'poses, so she just lies down after lunch."