An air of factitious geniality pervaded the dining-room.

An engraving of Frans Hals's "Laughing Cavalier" hung with too great a semblance of jollity over the oak sideboard.
Everything was too new, too ordered, too unindividual; but Sypher loved it, especially the high-art wall-paper and restless frieze.

Zora, a woman of instinctive taste, who, if she bought a bedroom water-bottle, managed to identify it with her own personality, professed her admiration with a woman's pitying mendacity, but resolved to change many things for the good of Clem Sypher's soul.

Emmy, still pale and preoccupied, said little.

She was not in a mood to appreciate Clem Sypher, whose loud voice and Napoleonic manners jarred upon her nerves.