Whether tragedy or comedy would emerge was all on the knees of the gods.
"It's a nice room, isn't it ?" asked Kitty when there had passed from Mona Crozier's eyes the glaze or mist--not of tears, but stupefaction--which had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table, and the desk.
"Most comfortable, and so very clean--quite spotless," the wife answered admiringly, and yet drearily.

It made her feel humiliated that her man could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her own delicate and charming person.

Here, it would seem, he was content.
One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed, like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned, sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that high stand for the desk himself).

That was what the room conveyed to her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march.

After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a little card hung under the small mirror on the wall.