The house of Henry K. Loring, Captain of Industry and patron saint of one or more great businesses, was situated on that part of Central Park East which Colonel Van Duyn called Mammon’s Mile. The land upon which it was built was more valuable even than the sands of Pactolus; and the architect, keenly conscious of his obligations to the earth which supported this last monument to his genius, had let no opportunity slip by which would make the building more expensive for its owner. Column, frieze, capital and entablature, all bore the tokens of his playful imagination, and the hipped roof which climbed high above its neighbors, ended in a riot of finial and coping, as though the architect nearing the end of his phantasy (and his commission) had crowded into the few short moments which remained to him all the ornament that had been forbidden him elsewhere. The edifice had reached the distinction of notice by the conductors of the “rubber-neck” busses on the Avenue and of the reproach of Percy Endicott, whose scurrilous comment that “it contained all of the fifty-seven varieties” had now become a by-word down town.
But the lofty hall and drawing-room of the house failed to fulfill the dire prediction of its ornate exterior, for here the architect, as though with a sudden awakening of the artistic conscience, had developed a simple scheme in an accepted design which somewhat atoned for his previous prodigality. A portrait of the master of the house, by an eminent Englishman, hung in the hall, and in the drawing-room were other paintings of wife and daughter, by Americans and Frenchmen, almost, if not equally, eminent. The continent of Europe had been explored in search of tapestries and ornaments for the house of this new prince of finance, and evidences of rare discrimination were apparent at every hand. And yet with all its splendor, the house lacked an identity and an ego. It was too sophisticated. Each object of art, beautiful in itself, spoke of a different taste—a taste which had been bought and paid for. It was like a museum which one enters with interest but without emotion. It was a house without a soul.
It was toward this splendid mausoleum that the daughter of the house made her way after her meeting with Mr. Gallatin in the Park. After one quick look over her shoulder in the direction from which she had come, she walked up the driveway hurriedly and rang the bell, entering the glass vestibule, from which, while she waited for the door to be opened, she peered furtively forth. A man in livery took the leashes of the poodles from her hand and closed the door behind her.
“Has Mother come in, Hastings?”
“Yes, Miss Loring. She has been asking for you.”
Miss Loring climbed the marble stairway that led to the second floor, but before she reached the landing, a voice sounded in her ears, a thin voice pitched in a high key of nervous tension.
“Jane! Where have you been? Don’t you know that we’re going to the theatre with the Dorsey-Martin’s to-night? Madame Thiebout has been waiting for you for at least an hour. What has kept you so long?”
“I was walking, Mother,” said the girl. “I have a headache. I—I’m not going to-night.”
Mrs. Loring’s hands flew up in horrified protest. “There!” she cried. “I knew it. If it hadn’t been a headache, it would have been something else. It’s absurd, child. Why, we must go. You know how important it is for us to keep in with the Dorsey-Martins. It’s the first time they’ve asked us to anything, and it means so much in every way.”