Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/124

112 And a very estimable young person, indeed, I inwardly repeated—a regular young lily-white doe, to be acting in that sort of company, a snowy lambkin with a prune in her pocket, to be holding out in that sort of house! But I was compelled to keep my thoughts to myself, for my friend the weasel was already making impatient signs for me to follow him.

He first looked out along the hall (and his attitude was startlingly like that of a rodent peering from its burrow), apparently to make sure that the coast was clear. Then he led me to an automatic elevator with mother-of-pearl buttons, told me to step inside, and sent me sailing upward like a cash-bucket in a department-store.

When the door opened—and I noticed that it opened of itself—I stepped out into a dream of a room all done in green, with hangings and curtains of sea-green faintly threaded with silver. It had green brocaded chairs, and sconces of silver set in shields of paler green. It made me hold my breath for a moment, for I'd never seen anything like it in every-day life before. There was both grandeur and good taste there, in every corner of it, and it made the motion-picture sets of Fifth Avenue homes