“Jane!” He had opened the portal and stood at it, waiting for me.

“Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments,” he said; “that house is a mere dungeon: don’t you feel it so?”

“It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir.”

“The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,” he answered; “and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.

Now here” (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) “all is real, sweet, and pure.