A bookcase, old enough to warm the heart of the most ardent antiquarian, held his small and unusual collection of books. Standing side by side, on the same shelf, were French romances, unexpurgated, and the Holy Bible, much bethumbed and pencilled. There were schoolbooks alongside of sentimental love tales, Greek lexicons and quaint old fairy stories, law books and works on criminology; books on botany, geology, anatomy, and physics. In all, perhaps, there were two hundred volumes. A life of Napoleon revealed signs of almost constant usage. There were three portraits of the Corsican on the dingy green walls.
The strange character of the man was best shown by the pictures that adorned--or rather disfigured the walls. Vulgar photographs and prints were to be seen on all sides. Mingled with these cheap creations were excellent copies of famous Madonnas, quaint Scriptural drawings, engravings of the Saviour, and an allegorical coloured print which emphasised the joys of heaven. There was also a badly drawn but idealised portrait of Droom, done in crayon at the age of twenty. This portrait was one of his prized possessions. He loved it best because it was a bust and did not expose his longitudinal defects. If Droom ever had entertained a feminine visitor in his apartments, there is no record of the fact. But few men had seen the interior of his home, and they had gone away with distressed, perplexed sensibilities.
He cooked his own meals on the oil stove, and, alone, ate them from the little table that stood near the heater. Occasionally, he went out to a near-by eating house for a lonely feast. His rooms usually reeked with the odour of boiled coffee, burnt cabbage and grease, pungent chemicals and long-suffering bed linen. Of his "front" room, it may be said that it was kitchen, dining-room, parlour, library, workshop, laboratory and conservatory. Four flower-pots in which as many geraniums existed with difficulty, despite Droom's constant and unswerving care, occupied a conspicuous place on the window-sills overlooking the street. He watched aver them with all the tender solicitude of a lover, surprising as it may appear when one pauses to consider the vicious exterior of the man.
Drdom was frugal. He was, in truth, a miser. If anyone had asked him what he expected to do with the money he was putting away in the bank, he could not have answered, calculating as he was by nature. He had no relative to whom he would leave it and he had no inclination to give up the habit of active employment. His salary was small, but he managed to save more than half of it--for a "rainy day," as he said. He did his reading and experimenting by kerosene light, and went to bed by candle light, saving a few pennies a week in that way. The windows in his apartment were washed not oftener than once a year. He was seldom obliged to look through them during the day, and their only duty at night was to provide ventilation--and even that was characteristically meagre.