He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
"I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come."
"I'm disturbing a new poem," said Carey.
Sir Donald's faded face acknowledged it.
"Sorry. I'll go."
"No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down."
Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of
books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian
carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and
elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange
perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
"I light it with wax candles," said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
"It's a good room to think in, or to be sad in."
He struck a match on his boot.
"You like to shut out London," he continued.
"Yes. Yet I live in it."
"And hate it. So do I. London's like a black-browed brute that gets an
unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
Yet one can't get away from it."
"It holds interesting minds and interesting faces."
"Didn't Persia?"
"Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands."
"You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?"
"No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
within me.
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