here was the fulfilment of every fantasy of an imagination revelling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and splendid ease. Pictures, marbles, vases, — in brief, more shapes of luxury than there could be any object in enumerating, except for an auctioneer’s advertisement, — and the whole repeated and doubled by the reflection of a great mirror, which showed me Zenobia’s proud figure, likewise, and my own. It cost me, I acknowledge, a bitter sense of shame, to perceive in myself a positive effort to bear up against the effect which Zenobia sought to impose on me.

I reasoned against her, in my secret mind, and strove so to keep my footing. In the gorgeousness with which she had surrounded herself, — in the redundance of personal ornament, which the largeness of her physical nature and