Guests arrived and guests departed from Adriutha, but the original gathering remained.
The people who came and went were about the kind that Edgerton had expected to encounter—people identified with nothing in particular except money, and not always with that.
For, into the social mess at Adriutha an author or two was occasionally stirred as seasoning; sometimes an artist became temporarily englutenized over a week-end, emerging on Monday well fed and satiated with hope of material results from cohabitation with wealth—which never materialized.
Edgerton was inclined to take them all as cheerfully as he found them—at their face value; and they were not always pretty.
Loyalty to obligation was inherent in his race, perhaps the strongest trait in him; and all his inclinations toward what was easiest, his content with the superficial, his tendency to drift, had not yet radically altered this trait, nor perhaps other qualities latent under the froth.
For a few days in the beginning, humorous curiosity, the novelty of his anomalous position, the very rawness of the experience, amused him; but the veneer of everything soon wore thin, revealing the duller surface underneath. Then came uneasiness and impatience; but loyalty to his bargain and to his kindred were matters of course, and he determined to find in these people something to interest him and render his sojourn among them at least endurable.
After that first stormy night in June, the splendor of a limpid, rain-washed morning had revealed to him the gross outward impossibility of this place of millions—the vast, new "villa," red-tiled and yellow-walled, hideous in its multiplicity of roofs, angles, terraces and bays, with outlying works of rubble, concrete, and railroad-station floral embellishment.
Scarring the green crypt of nature, staining the glass of the stream with painted reflections of its architectural deformities, Adriutha Lodge sprawled monsterlike and naked in the summer sunshine.
Garage, hothouses, stables, barns, a farm, a model dairy, like grewsome spawn of a common architectural dam, affronted the woods and meadows of this little valley set among the remote Berkshires.
There was no reticence left in that desecrated valley all vibrant with the scream of discordant color, texture, and design. Motor cars, too, were noisy along the road; all day the silver-mounted trappings of horses flashed in the sun. Staccato echoes from power boats on the artificial lake offended. The House of Rivett challenged the Eternal patience with a hundred lightning rods.