The yellow sofa was so placed that from it one could look nowhere but at the portrait of the Countess; and so, in my enforced contemplation of it, I was amused to see that upon the spinet there stood a vase of yellow rosebuds, the duplicates of which were set in such fresh profusion upon the tables in the entry. But a second discovery was even more amusing: I had been struck by the radiance of the canvas because the nearest sconce to it was several feet away, and now I perceived that craftily concealed under the inner frame at the top was a long, fluorescent tube sending a smooth shower of light over the whole surface! This in a Puritan house! In the hall of a great lady so sensitive she could not abide electricity! It occurred to me that other people had not seen what I had but had simply taken for granted, or had not noticed at all, the extraordinary visibility of this one object in the shadowy lobby, for Miss Pride or Hopestill, when they had told me of the candelabra, would surely have told me of this inconsistency if they had ever observed it. For, although they were both fond of her as were their friends, they found Berthe von Happel irritating and would most likely have been delighted to learn that at least in one particular she was a fraud. “I don’t mean to criticize Berthe’s taste,” Miss Pride had said, “because on one level it is superb taste, but I must say that there is something malentendu in the way she has turned poor Ralph Brooks’ house into a museum. And not to put too fine a point on it, frankly, when I go there and the last thing I have seen is the Common, if I’m coming from Pierce’s, or General Hooker, if I’m coming from Goodspeed’s, I feel very much as if I were going into Loew’s Orpheum.”