When she added a little colour it was not, at any rate, to her drapery.

Her small rooms had the peculiarity that everything they contained appeared to testify with vividness to her position in society, quite as if they had been furnished by the bounty of admiring friends.
They were adorned indeed almost exclusively with objects that nobody buys, as had more than once been remarked by spectators of her own sex, for herself, and would have been luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in photographic portraits slashed across with signatures, in baskets of flowers beribboned with the cards of passing compatriots, and in a neat collection of red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical volumes, aids to London lucidity, of every sort, devoted to addresses and engagements.

To be in Miss Cutter's tiny drawing-room, in short, even with Miss Cutter alone--should you by any chance have found her so--was somehow to be in the world and in a crowd.

It was like an agency--it bristled with particulars.
This was what the tall lean loose gentleman lounging there before her might have appeared to read in the suggestive scene over which, while she talked to him, his eyes moved without haste and without rest.

"Oh come, Mamie!" he occasionally threw off; and the words were evidently connected with the impression thus absorbed.