Chapter 2. “Will you Walk into My Parlor?”
The room was large and well lighted, the walls and ceiling hung with admirable hangings of chintz that a friend of hers in the diplomatic service had brought home and presented to her. The ground was yellow, as if it had been dipped in golden cream, and the designs of all colors, in which Persian green was predominant, represented fantastic buildings with curving roofs, about which monstrosities in the shape of beasts and birds were running and flying: lions wearing wigs, antelopes with extravagant horns, and birds of paradise.
The furniture was scanty. Upon three long tables with tops of green marble were arranged all the implements requisite for a pretty woman’s toilette. Upon one of them, the central one, were the great basins of thick crysta
