"We might dine together, perhaps? Atwater may be able to come, too."
"No—can't do it," was Armstrong's reply. "But I'll be here from half past eight on."
Trafford, so much encouraged that he was almost serene again, sped away to Atwater's palace in Madison Avenue. The palace was a concession to Mrs. Atwater and the daughters. They loved display and had the tastes that always accompany that passion; they, therefore, lived in the unimaginative and uncomfortable splendor of the upper class heaven that is provided by the makers of houses and furniture, whose one thought, naturally, is to pile on the cost and thus multiply the profits.
But Atwater had part of the house set aside for and dedicated to his own personal satisfaction. With the same sense of surprise that one has at the abrupt transition of a dream from one phantasy to another resembling it in no way except as there is a resemblance in flat contradictions, one passed out of the great, garish, price-encrusted entrance hall, through a door to the left into a series of really beautiful rooms—spacious, simple, solidly furnished; with quiet harmonies of color, with no suggestions of mere ornamentation anywhere. The Siersdorfs had built and furnished the whole house, and its double triumph was their first success. With the palace part they had pleased the Atwater women and the crowd of rich eager to display; with the part sacred to Atwater, they had delighted him and such people as formed their ideas of beauty upon beauty itself and not upon fashion or tradition or outlay. Trafford was shown into a music room where Atwater was playing on the piano, as he did almost every evening for an hour before dinner. It was a vast room, walls and ceilings paneled in rosewood; there were no hangings, except at the windows valances of velvet of a rosewood tint, relieved by a broad, dull gold stripe; a few simple articles of furniture; Boris Raphael's famous "Music" on the wall opposite the piano, and no other picture; a huge vase of red and gold chrysanthemums at the opposite side of the room to balance the painting; Atwater at the piano, in a dark red, velvet house suit, over it a silk robe of a somewhat lighter shade of red, as the room was not heated.
"Business?" he said, pausing in his playing, with a careless, unfriendly glance at Trafford.
"I'll only trouble you a moment," apologized the intruder. His prim, strait-laced appearance gave those surroundings, made sensuous by Boris's intoxicatingly sensuous picture, an air of impropriety, of immorality—like a woman in Quaker dress among the bare shoulders, backs, and bosoms of a ballroom.
"Business!" exclaimed Atwater, rising. "Not in this room, if you please."
He led the way to a smaller room with a billiard table in the center and great leather seats and benches round the walls. "Do you play, Trafford? Music, I mean."
"I regret to say, I do not," replied Trafford.
"Then you ought to get a mechanical piano. Music in the evening is like a bath after a day in the trenches. Try it. It'll soothe you, put you into a better condition for the next day's bout. What can I do for you?"