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Around it are grouped an ominous assortment of decanters, glasses, and heaped ash-trays, the latter still raising wavy smoke-ladders into the stale air, the effect on the whole needing but a skull to resemble that venerable chromo, once a fixture in every "den," which presents the appendages to the life of pleasure with delightful and awe-inspiring sentiment.

Up in the supper room the air was hot. The table, littered with napkins and ash-trays, was old and stale. It was between dances as they entered, and Muriel Kane looked up with roguishness extraordinary. "Well, where have you been?" "To call up mother," answered Gloria coolly. "I promised her I would. Did we miss a dance?"

I work for I used to work for the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. In New York." "Oh. I see. Novelties? Nice little ash-trays with `Love from the Erie Station'? And woggly pin-cushions?" "Yes! And fat pug-dogs with black eyes." "Oh no-o-o! Please not black! Pale sympathetic blue eyes nice honest blue eyes!" "Nope. Black. Awful black.... Say, gee, I ain't talking too nutty, am I?"

Count Arco, seeing my embarrassment, proposed my staying the night at Petit Val. Henry's living there made it easier for me. So I accepted his offer; besides, there was no choice. The soldiers arranged my room according to their ideas of a lady's requirements, which included a boot-jack, ash-trays, beer-mugs, etc. Their intentions were of the best.

Tea-pots of mottled glaze, and cream-jugs with knobs of gilt, and square china ash-trays on which one instinctively expected to find the legend "Souvenir of Niagara Falls." Too many cake-baskets and too few sugar-bowls. Dark blue plates with warts on the edges and melancholy landscapes painted in the centers. Chintzes and wall-papers of patterns fashionable in 1890.

But as they stood together, making much of Caroline, she saw that the chair Wilson had indicated was evidently one sacred to himself. The long, low seat, and the small table near containing cigarettes, ash-trays, pipes, and other conveniences, all pointed to the same care on the part of these two women.

I turned away from them, put my foot on the fender, stuck my elbow on the plush-fringed mantelboard, and studied the photographs, pipes, and ash-trays that adorned it. What was it I had to think out before I went to the station? Of course!

Always the same order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the counter, the same odour that wipes your face like a towel the instant you enter; and the same smiles, the same gestures, the same black fabric stretched to tension over the same impressive mammiferous phenomena of the same inexplicable creatures who apparently never eat and never sleep, imprisoned for life in the hallowed and mystic hollow between the bottles and the zinc.

And I thought nothing; absolutely nothing. I had no ideas; I had no strength. I felt no sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. I just saw the pink effulgence, the cane tables, the palms, the globular match-holders, the indented ash-trays.

Of course, a few lay on the floor, but then Lindström had been running about in the dark, and perhaps he had pulled them down. On the table, by the window, stood a gramophone and some tobacco-boxes and ash-trays. The furniture was not plentiful, nor was it in the style of Louis Quinze or Louis Seize, but it was sufficient.