Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/199

Rh cupboard-like bed chambers which in by-gone days had been improvised beneath the slanting shelter of the stairs.

The mansion had been abandoned as a residence in the '90's, when an aging, penurious maiden lady, last survivor of a pre-Revolutionary family, had passed away. She had used only three of the mansion's countless rooms. After her death, no one wanted the vast, ramshackle and decaying house. One day, an auctioneer disposed of many valuable antiques. Then thirty years passed by the tenantless house, its taxes paid out of the fund derived from the sale of the furniture. At last, Ernie Emerson purchased it and had transformed it into a playhouse. The vivid taste of the jeweler arrogantly superseded the mild monotones of the past. Color, color and more color, was Emerson's demand. Walls, which had been chastely bare, now blared with cerises and salmons; bedrooms blazed in oranges and lavenders, pale blues and shocking purples. Many of the rooms were over-furnished; lamps were shaded in all the hues of the spectrum; coats of mail hung vacantly in unexpected corners; huge Spanish chests were large enough to contain the gold plate of an emperor; pennants flung on walls, tapestries flapping nearby, paintings scattered between.

The ball-room, now kaleidoscopic with moving figures, still retained some of its ancient dignity. Emerson had redecorated it but he could not change its effective spaciousness nor the contour of the balcony boxes which faced a platform upon which a jazz band now brayed. In the foremost box, where once a haughty Colonial matron had received congratulations on the marriage of her daughter to a gentleman of Louis XVI's bed chamber, Emerson, attired in severe and correct evening dress, now sat.

He was flushed a deep pink. In his left hand he held a