“Famously. The lot is bought. Mr. Van Brunt was here all the morning. It's going to be something Oriental, mediaeval, nineteenth-century, gorgeous, and domestic. Van Brunt says he wants it to represent me.”
“How?” inquired Jack; “all the four facades different?”
“With an interior unity—all the styles brought to express an individual taste, don't you know. A different house from the four sides of approach, and inside, home—that's the idea.”
“It appears to me,” said Jack, still bantering, “that it will look like an apartment-house.”
“That is just what it will not—that is, outside unity, and inside a menagerie. This won't look gregarious. It is to have not more than three stories, perhaps only two. And then exterior color, decoration, statuary.”
“And gold?”
“Not too much—not to give it a cheap gilded look. Oh, I asked him about Nero's house. As I remember it, that was mostly caverns. Mr. Van Brunt laughed, and said they were not going to excavate this house. The Roman notion was barbarous grandeur. But in point of beauty and luxury, this would be as much superior to Nero's house as the electric light is to a Roman lamp.”
“Not classic, then?”
“Why, all that's good in classic form, with the modern spirit. You ought to hear Mr. Van Brunt talk. This country has never yet expressed itself in domestic inhabitation.”
“It's going to cost! What does Mr. Henderson say?”