The stone dwelling of Senator Cyrus C. Todd, usually as indistinguishable from its neighbors as is one piano key from another, presented at nine o'clock on this night of November third, nineteen hundred and three, a claim to individuality in the excess of light pouring from every window, from the perpendicular wink of every opening door (opened but to close again as quickly); oozing, it would seem, from the very pores of the pale façade, thereby giving to the great flat rectangle of the house a phosphorescent value that set it six feet out into the night.
The upper windows shone more brilliantly than those below. A roller shade had been carelessly left high. Through the film of chamber curtains heads could be seen passing. Once, there was the outflung gesture of a slim, bare arm. Everything bespoke approaching festivity. At this brightest window a silhouette suddenly appeared, sharp, dark, complete. It was that of a Japanese girl with wonderfully looped and curved coiffure, shoulders that sloped tenderly, and a small, straight throat.
Just at this moment, on the shadowed entrance-steps below, answering silhouettes began noiselessly to climb. These were men with thin black legs, and strange burdens, black like themselves. They showed angles as of gnarled roots; one, the great curved body of a gigantic spider. The front door, opening instantly to a ring, disclosed them merely as musicians,—Signor Marcellini of Milan and his colleagues,—bearing basso, cello, and flutes, secure in swart cases.
The lower rooms of the house were slightly chill. Though flooded with soft light, they were not yet fully illuminated. All doors within stood open. It looked almost as if walls had been taken down, so long and mysterious had grown the vistas. Through all tingled an aromatic smell, something a little alien, like crushed herbs,—pungent, and full of vague suggestion. Mrs. Cyrus C. Todd, flowing now down the palm-set stairway in a purple tide of skirts, frothed with dim lace, stopped at a switchboard half concealed in vines, sent forth a gloved, determined hand, and in an instant the secret of the odor was revealed. The rooms, to their farthest angles, literally exuded chrysanthemums. Senator Todd was said to have expended five thousand dollars for these flowers alone. Perhaps he wished to stamp in gold upon the memory of Washington this coming-out party of his idolized, only child. The conceit was fair enough, for Gwendolen was bright, and blonde, and golden in herself. Statesmen and the wives of statesmen did not fail to observe that chrysanthemums were the insignia of official Japan, and that November third happened,—they emphasized "happened,"—to be the birthday of Japan's beloved Emperor. These two facts, joined with the third, that Senator Todd even now had aspirations to the Tokio mission, made a trio of keen angles to be used as wedges for further speculation.
The walls of the lower story had been spread for the occasion with yellow satin, upon which alternated delicate upright strokes of silver and of white. Around, under the ceiling, grew a frieze of living flowers. The great, coarse, woody stems crossed in a lattice-work, with clusters of huge blossoms and green leaves breaking the angles at points of decision possible only to a trained artist, or to a Japanese. The white duck floor-covering spread to a border hand-painted, to match the frieze. Where wall and canvas met, the real flowers again arose,—thick parallel stalks of differing heights, upholding a wainscot border of shaggy gold. Mantles were heaped with them. Japanese pots of them in bloom alternated with conventional ferns and palms. Each electric bulb jutted from the heart of a living flower. The very air had an amber tone.
Overhead, invisible footsteps scurried in short flights. They sounded feminine, young, full of excitement. "Heavens!" Miss Gwendolen de Lancy Todd was crying, "where on earth is my other glove? I am sure I just laid it here! And my orchids! Has anybody sat on my orchids? I think I'll have to marry the young person who sent them, though I forget now who it was!"
"A person of the name Dodge, n'est-ce-pas?" ventured the little French dressmaker, on her knees beside the fair white vision. Pins, retained at the corners of her mouth, added a crushed softness to the pronunciation. She rhymed it with "targe."
"Yes, a name like that, I believe," said Gwendolen, indifferently, and craned her long neck over. "Mother called him some sort of a snip. Are you certain that my dress hangs right now, Madame?"
"Oui, oui. It is perfection," declared Madame, sticking the remaining pins into the black front of her dress.
"Then at last I am actually ready. I believe there's mother calling now. Where did Yuki go? Oh, I see, over there by the window, as calm and cool as if we were going to church instead of to our first ball!"