He was ready for any illusion, susceptible to any vagary of the imagination.
He looked round the room.

So this was the way the swaggering, masterful Gorgio lived?
Here were pictures and engravings which did not seem to belong to a new town in a new land, where everything was useful or spectacular.

Here was a sense of culture and refinement.

Here were finished and unfinished water-colours done by Ingolby's own hand or bought by him from some hard-up artist earning his way mile by mile, as it were.

Here were books, not many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields in which Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had never entered.