The wings of his chair cast long, flickering streaks of shadow stretching to the door like bleak tongues licking at the guest’s feet. This young man stood in the threshold quietly, sometimes leaning to one side and another, his eyes fixed on the chair. He’d undone his tie, left his jacket with the butler earlier, and had unbuttoned his trim waistcoat. Behind him, the bright electric light streamed, the silhouette of his wide shoulders surrounding the fireplace and the chair seated before it.
The room was a musty study, the thick smell of books wafting over the young man. It was some part of the ancient mansion which had hitherto escaped the progress of mechanism and modernity, some vestige of the house as it had been when a loving architect first touched his sheets of blue. There were many rooms like it here, hidden with something like magic: One never knew when, turning a corner or stepping over a threshold, he might find himself transported to another time. Yet this quality was not such as a room or hallway possessed it in full, was not always there to be found where it was an hour or a minute ago. It had nothing of the dependability of science, nothing of the servitude expected from a flip switch, but shared that life only a fire can hold. These places would burn an unprepared soul.
And the chair before the fire, its shadowed back to the door, remained an enigma as the guest strained to see around it.
Tale Told 