You could never be sure what would be the dominant note in the long room with the old-ivory tinted walls in the front of the house. This room was Helen’s own. Here, she changed the ornaments as she would the flowers, with every changing season and mood. Therefore there were few of the objects of value in the Museum that, one time or another, didn’t descend to the rooms below.

Cornelius Morrison discovered his collection all over again. As Helen isolated one piece of it after another and placed it in a sympathetic environment, he was constantly finding new beauties in form and line and color, heretofore unseen. He liked to boast that he had never enjoyed his collection until Helen came with her unerring intuitions. She gave it new birth. Helen gave new birth to everything he possessed. He told her that she gave new birth to him, too.

2

HELEN HAD KNOWN Cornelius Morrison ever since she was a little girl. He was her father’s friend—not so old as her father by a decade or so, but a younger brother of the same generation. He used to come occasionally and spend a night in her father’s house in Reddington, on his way farther west, or else on his way back to New York from some protracted journey to China or Japan. He was one of the few honored guests for whom the wine-glasses were always produced and the little liqueur set. Helen used to examine his baggage in secret—his umbrella, his overcoat, his toilet articles—for they were permeated with the same vague fascinating cosmopolitanism of which she was aware whenever he opened his mouth to speak. In those days he was “Mr. Morrison” to Helen. He was “Mr. Morrison” to her up to the day she told him she would marry him. One of the hardest things she had to do was to learn to call him Cornelius.

Helen spent the first half-dozen years of her long boarding-school career in a small town in Connecticut. But she finished her education at a boarding-school in New York. Judge Dane wrote to his friend Cornelius Morrison, when Helen went to New York, and asked him if he would look up his little daughter sometime, and see if she seemed happy in her new environment.

Cornelius Morrison was very kind to the little daughter. He became a sort of fairy godfather to Helen and her group of friends at the New York school. He sent them flowers. He sent them candy. He gave them theater-parties, and afternoon-tea-parties, and college football-parties—all properly chaperoned, all properly discussed and arranged with the mistress of such affairs at the school.