THE consulting–rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea–front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well–lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue–green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue–green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry.
