“Perhaps you'll help us to appraise our loss by giving me his name,” I
suggested.
“Oh, it is the wonderful Count Carola!” said she. “He is about the most
fascinating creature that I ever saw.”
My brain reeled and fell at her feet and called silently for help. In
half a second it had picked itself up again.
We went into the dining-room. What a fair of jewels and laces and
fresh-cut flowers! At eleven o'clock they were going to have a
dance--kind of a surprise party! They called it The Ball of the Roses.
Our table had a big crop of red and white roses, and in the middle of it
was a little fountain among ferns. Its spray fell with a pleasant sound
upon water-lilies in a big, mossy bowl.
The retired lumber king sat opposite me, and a retired frog sat between
us on a lily-pad at the edge of the fountain-bowl. He was a goodsized
real frog who was planning to return to active life, I judged, for he
sat with alert eyes as if on the lookout for a business opportunity. I
observed that he looked hopefully at me when I sat down at the right of
Mrs. Fraley, with Mrs. Sampf at my side, as if willing to abandon the
frivolous life any minute if I could suggest an opening for an energetic
young frog. Mrs. Fraley explained that the frog was tied to the edge of
the bowl by a silk thread which was fastened about his neck. I ceased
then to fear and suspect him.
I could not help thinking how much good Terre Haute money had gone into
these decorations, and we should have been just as well pleased without
the frog and the fountain.
Here we are at last right in the midst of things--grandeur! high life!
nobility! abdominal hills and valleys! fair slopes of rolling, open
country with their stones imbedded in gold and platinum! toes twinging
with gout! faces with the utohel look on them!
What a pantheon of rococo deities was this dining-room--princes and
princesses, counts and discounts, countesses and marquises, Wall Street
millionaires and millionheiresses, and average American wives and widows
with friends and dining-men. What is a dining-man? He's a professional
diner-out. He has only to look aristocratic and speak Italian--or
English with a Fifth-Avenue accent--and be able to recognize the people
worth while. A fat old English duchess with a staff in her hand and the
royal purple in her hair made her way to her table with the walk of an
apple-woman. There was no nonsense about her, no illusions, no clinging
to a vanished youth. She was a real woman, and I could have kissed the
hem of her garments for joy.
A lady sat at one of the tables who suggested the chloride of nitrogen,
being so fat and fetched in at the waist that her shoulders heaved at
every breath, and one could not look at her without fearing that she
would explode and fill the air with hooks and eyes and buttons.
A large, swell-front, fully furnished Pennsylvania widow sat near us
with her young daughter and a marquis and a well-earned reputation for
great wealth. It seemed to be a busy, popular, agreeable reputation,
with many acquaintances in the room. The widow's costume pleaded for
observation and secured it, for she sat serene and prodigious in jeweled
fat and satin, dripping pearls and emeralds and diamonds. There was
a battlement of diamonds on her brow and a cinch of them on her neck,
surrounded by a stone wall of pearls as big as the marbles that I used
to play with as a boy. Hanging from her ears were two mammoth pearls,
either of which in a sling might have slain Goliath. Her shoulders
glowed with gems, and a stomacher of diamonds adorned her intemperate
zone. What a fresco of American abundance she made in the remarkable
decorations of that room. By and by she drew a wallet from her breast
and paid her bill.
“How wonderful!” our hostess exclaimed, suddenly.
A princess in red slippers and with no stockings on her feet, as Mrs.
Fraley informed me, strode in with her young man and took a table near
us. She had been a Wisconsin girl, and her happy Fifth Avenue dialect
rose like the spray of a fountain and fell lightly on our ears.
“We had a sockless statesman in our country, but I never heard of a
sockless princess before,” Mrs. Sampf sputtered. “They tell me that some
of these aristocrats are very poor.”
Mrs. Sampf had been to Egypt and the Holy Land, and talked freely of her
travels.
“Yes, we went up the Nile to see the dam,” she said. “It's a good dam, I
guess, but I didn't care much for it. What I wanted to see was the life.
The folks are awful dirty; I wanted to take a scrubbing-brush and some
Pearline and go at 'em.”
“A few American women with scrubbing-brushes would improve the Egyptian
race,” I suggested. “How about the food?”
“Heavens! I've et everything there is going, I guess; it would take
you a month to learn the names of the vittles. I've got 'em all in my
diary.”
“I suppose you enjoyed the ruins,” I said.
And she went on:
“I saw a bull temple; it was very nice. You know, they used to worship
bulls. I don't know what for. They must have been hard up for something
to worship. There was five of us traveling on our own hooks. We saw one
temple that was quite nicely carved--had crows and goats on it. I love
goats. Sometimes I think that I must have been a goat in some previous
life.”