to come. Here in the transitional gallery the ceiling height lifts another eight inches without announcement, the way a breath deepens before a revelation, and the divided-light transoms now frame themselves fully overhead, casting latticed afternoon light across heart-pine flooring that has darkened to the color of well-aged wheated bourbon. If the previous passage carried the quiet restraint of a St. Cloud drawing room, this stretch opens with the generous amplitude St. Louis collectors would recognize instinctively—proportions scaled not for intimacy but for gathering, for the kind of room where a dozen guests could stand among limestone mantels and hand-adzed beams without once feeling crowded. The corridor widens ahead into what the architecture has been promising since the entry hall, and the air itself seems to change temperature, cooled by the mass of stone that waits just beyond the threshold in Stamford-gray