The meeting had rendered me a service by taking my thoughts off the entrance I was about to make into a strange house, so that when I opened the street door, I rang the bell at once without having to wait for courage to lift my finger to the button. I was admitted by a manservant into a vast lobby lighted by three iron candelabra and a number of sconces placed at intervals like arc lights. I had heard of the Countess’ prejudice against electricity, the effect of which, she claimed, was to destroy shadows, and shadows, like echoes and like the aftertaste of Moselle wine, were sources of inspiration to her. She had succeeded in creating with her candles a theatrical effect, and through some optical illusion made by the long shadows against the walls, which a highlight here and there revealed as lustrous and would have shone under electricity, the hall seemed much larger than it actually was and the ceilings loftier. I was guided over a Persian carpet and past “occasional” groups of high-backed chairs and console tables upon which stood vases of yellow rosebuds whose outer petals were ruffling into full maturity. Then, as though entering a bay from an estuary, we turned to the right into a wide, square room, dominated on the left by a staircase, illuminated like the entry with sconces, and on the opposite side by a portrait of the Countess in a double frame. She sat at a spinet in a pale blue Empire dress with her golden hair piled high, her head held well back to set off her nose. It was impossible to tell whether she were about to play or had just finished, for her musicianly hands rested in her lap, and the expression on her face gave no clue since all the other features were tyrannized over by the nose, sufficient unto itself. Just as the candlelight, perhaps intentionally, hinted that the owner conserved imported customs, older than the old Boston house, older than her own experience, dating from times before the fall of princes and the commercialization of palaces, and by its metamorphosis of the hall, otherwise so like all other halls on Beacon Hill, sharply designated the mistress as a member of a different species, so the portrait, pompous with the self-importance of the ruling class, gave those who viewed it to understand that an even further distinction was to be made between the Countess and her neighbors: that in that species she was a unique specimen, for she was not only aristocratic, but she was beautiful and talented as well, and, implied the station of the picture, according to standards that were not local, the most beautiful and most talented woman in Boston.