“Why shouldn't she be?” Carmen asked in return. “She has everything she wants. They both have a little temper; life would be flat without that; she is a little irritable sometimes; she didn't use to be; and when they don't agree they let each other alone for a little. I think she is as happy as anybody can be who is married. Now you are shocked! Well, I don't know any one who is more in love than she is, and that may be happiness. She is becoming exactly like Mr. Henderson. You couldn't ask anything more than that.”
If Margaret were really happy, the earl told Miss Forsythe, he was glad, but it was scarcely the career he would have thought would have suited her.
Meantime, the great house was approaching completion. Henderson's palace, in the upper part of the city, had long been a topic for the correspondents of the country press. It occupied half a square. Many critics were discontented with it because it did not occupy the whole square. Everybody was interested in having it the finest residence on the continent. Why didn't Henderson take the whole block of ground, build his palace on three sides, with the offices and stables on the fourth, throw a glass roof over the vast interior court, plant it with tropical trees and plants, adorn it with flower-beds and fountains, and make a veritable winter-garden, giving the inhabitants a temperate climate all the cold months? He might easily have summer in the centre of the city from November to April. These rich people never know what to do with their money. Such a place would give distinction to the city, and compel foreigners to recognize the high civilization of America. A great deal of fault was found with Henderson privately for his parsimony in such a splendid opportunity.
Nevertheless it was already one of the sights of the town. Strangers were taken to see it, as it rose in its simple grandeur. Local reporters made articles on the progress of the interior whenever they could get an entrance. It was not ornate enough to please, generally, but those who admired the old Louvre liked the simplicity of its lines and the dignity of the elevations. They discovered the domestic note in its quiet character, and said that the architect had avoided the look of an “institution” in such a great mass. He was not afraid of dignified wall space, and there was no nervous anxiety manifested, which would have belittled it with trivial ornamentation.
Perhaps it was not an American structure, although one could find in it all the rare woods and stones of the continent. Great numbers of foreign workmen were employed in its finishing and decoration. One could wander in it from Pompeii to Japan, from India to Versailles, from Greece to the England of the Tudors, from the Alhambra to colonial Salem. It was so cosmopolitan that a representative of almost any nationality, ancient or modern, could have been suited in it with an apartment to his taste, and if the interior lacked unity it did not lack a display of variety that appealed to the imagination. From time to time paragraphs appeared in English, French, and Italian journals, regarding the work of this and that famous artist who was designing a set of furniture or furnishing the drawings of a room, or carving the paneling and statuary, or painting the ceiling of an apartment in the great Palazzo Henderson in New York—Washington. The United American Workers (who were half foreigners by birth) passed resolutions denouncing Henderson for employing foreign pauper labor, and organized more than one strike while the house was building. It was very unpatriotic and un-American to have anything done that could not be done by a member of the Union. There was a firm of excellent stone-cutters which offered to make all the statuary needed in the house, and set it up in good shape, and when the offer was declined, it memorialized Congress for protection.
Although Henderson gave what time he could spare to the design and erection of the building, it pleased him to call it Margaret's house, and to see the eagerness with which she entered into its embellishment. There was something humorous in the enlargement of her ideas since the days when she had wondered at the magnificence of the Washington Square home, and modestly protested against its luxury. Her own boudoir was a cheap affair compared with that in the new house.
“Don't you think, dear,” she said, puzzling over the drawings, “that it would better be all sandalwood? I hate mosaics. It looks so cheap to have little bits of precious woods stuck about.”
“I should think so. But what do you do with the ebony?”
“Oh, the ebony and gold? That is the adjoining sitting-room—such a pretty contrast.”
“And the teak?”