But taking everything into consideration, I must say the game was worth the candle. By degrees we acquired the furnishings for our two Italian rooms and our other rooms—which, thank heaven, are not Italian but what you might call fancy-mixed! And by degrees likewise I perfected my artistic education. Of course we made mistakes in selection, as who does not? We have a few auction-room skeletons tucked away in our closet, or to speak more exactly, in the attic of the new house. But in the main we are satisfied with what we have done and no doubt will continue to be until Italian-style furniture goes out and Aztec Indian or Peruvian Inca or Thibetan Grand Llama or some other style comes in.
And when our friends drop in for an evening we talk decorations and furnishings—it is a subject which never wears out. Mostly the women callers favor discussions of tapestries and brocades with intervals spent in fits of mutual wonder over the terrible taste shown by some other woman—not present—in buying the stuff for her house; and the men are likely to be interested in carvings or paintings; but my strong suit is wormholing in all its branches—that and patina. I am very strong on the latter subject, also. In fact among friends I am now getting to be known as the Patina Kid.
CHAPTER VIII, THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE
I have dealt at length with our adventures at Fifth Avenue auction houses when we were amassing the furnishings for our Italian rooms and our Italian hallway. But I forgot to make mention of the many friends we encountered at the salesrooms—people who always before had seemed to us entirely normal, but now were plainly to be recognized for devotees of the same passion for bidding-in which had lain its insidious clutches upon us. I recall one victim in particular, a young woman whom I shall call Maude because that happens to be her name.
Theretofore this Maude lady had impressed mo as being one of the sanest, most competent females of my entire acquaintance—good-looking, witty and with a fine sense of proportion. Yet behold, here she was, balanced on the edge of a folding chair in an overheated, overcrowded room, her eyes feverish with a fanatical light, a printed catalogue clutched in her left hand and her right ready to go up in signal to the hypnotic gentleman on the auctioneer's block. At a glance we knew the symptoms because in them we saw duplicated our own. We knew exactly what ailed her: She was bidding on various articles, not because she particularly wanted them, but because she feared unless she bought them some stranger might.
After the sale had ended and her excitement—and ours—had abated we exchanged confidences touching on our besetting mania.
“Just coming and buying something that I wish afterward I hadn't bought isn't the worst of it,” she owned. “That is destructive only to my spending allowance. My chief trouble is that I've gotten so I can't bear to think of spending my afternoons anywhere except at this place or one of the places like it. And if there happen to be two sales going the same day at different shops I'm perfectly miserable. All the time I'm sitting in one I'm distracted by the thought that possibly I'm missing some perfectly wonderful bargain at the other. Sometimes I suspect that my intellect is beginning to give way under the strain, and then again I'm sure I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My husband has his own diagnosis. He says I'm just plain nutty, as he vulgarly expresses it. He has taken to calling me Nutchita, which he says is Spanish for a little nut. You know since Scott came back from South America he just adores to show off the Spanish he learned. He loves to tell how he went to a bull fight down there and saw the gallant mandatory stab the charging parabola to the heart with his shining bolero or whatever you call it.
“He says there is no hope of curing me and he appreciates the fact that teams of horses couldn't drag me away from these auction rooms, but he suggested that maybe we might be saved from spending our last days at the almshouse if before I started out on my mad career each afternoon I'd get somebody to muffle me and tie my arms fast so I couldn't bid on anything. But even if I couldn't speak or gesticulate I could still nod, so I suppose that wouldn't help. Besides, as I said to him, I would probably attract a good deal of attention riding down Fifth Avenue with my hands tied behind my back and a gag in my mouth. But he says he'd much rather I were made conspicuous now than that I should be even more conspicuous later on at a feeble-minded institute; he says they'd probably keep me in a strait-jacket anyhow after I reached the violent stage and that I might as well begin getting used to the feeling now.