Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/33

 They jogged up Park Street, turned left upon Beacon, and before a graceful Doric portico the fat white horses came to a willing stop. The ladies clambered out, and with secret admiration Lanice saw her emancipated cousin draw from her petticoat pocket a doorkey and quite like a man open the white door. With a certain pride in the fine house, Pauline pushed her in and through the hall into one of the two self-possessed living-rooms which ran the width of the mansion. The walls were papered with an exotic tropical landscape. Dark, flaunting trees shaded joyous revels of nymph and faun. Ruins twisted with faded roses. Goddesses in the unladylike costume of the First Empire disported themselves. When Lanice herself drew Venus, Calypso, or Ariadne, it was with difficulty that she kept the telltale hoop from under their skirts. She arranged their hair exactly as she did her own, nor might their freer spirits escape her tight stays. For this was beautiful and elegant. Skimpy draperies and snood-bound Psyches were wanton and ugly, and in the case of one nymph sporting by the fountain, actually indelicate.

Mahogany, sleek as the haunch of a polished horse, twinkling chandeliers, dripping their bright prisms, crimson curtains, fastidious woodwork. The more intimate of the two rooms was partly cut off by folding doors, and a massive screen of teak and fat jade.

Pauline's flea-like mind was leaping ahead in all sorts of wrong directions. She thought her young cousin still suffering from terror at the stranger's approach in the train. 'There, there,' she said, and