"It's a nice room, isn't it?" asked Kitty when there had passed from
Mona Crozier's eyes the glaze or mist--not of tears, but stupefaction--
which had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table,
and the desk.
"Most comfortable, and so very clean--quite spotless," the wife answered
admiringly, and yet drearily. It made her feel humiliated that her man
could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient
resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her
own delicate and charming person. Here, it would seem, he was content.
One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed,
like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the
wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned,
sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so
that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that
high stand for the desk himself). That was what the room conveyed to
her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop
and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march.
After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a
little card hung under the small mirror on the wall.
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