Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/140

 Columbine. The chairs and divans, possibly of Italian renaissance design, were covered for the season with a gay Derryvale linen. A few pictures hung on the walls: a bowl of zinnias by Florine Stettheimer, orchids by Charles Demuth, and magnified, scarlet cannas by Georgia O'Keeffe. The hallway, painted a bright Italian blue, sprinkled with tiny blue stars, ran parallel with the drawing-room from the front to the back of the house, leading down a flight of steps into the garden in the rear, where a shell-walk wandered in and out between tiny beds of azure flowers, planted under symmetrical chestnut-trees and catalpas with their heartshaped leaves and ridiculously long and slender seed-pods, to a fountain in the middle of the back wall, a fountain inspired by Nijinsky's interpretation of Mallarmé's faun. A huge umbrella, striped orange and black, almost like the canopy of a pavilion, protected a black table and chairs from the sunglare. The dining-room was in the basement and it had been the happy fancy of its mistress to hang the walls with an old-fashioned paper, printed in pink and white stripes after the manner of stick candy. On these walls she had fastened by means of pins a few ribald covers torn off Le Rire and La Vie Parisienne. The prim little black marble mantelshelf held half a dozen painted sugar statuettes, ravished from a Houston Street pasticceria, representing Sicilian banditi, not unmenacing, and bland shepherdesses with thick ankles, guarding