Then Christopher washed the
porches. Fanny, no matter how late she had been up the night before,
was dressed by eight o'clock, and put fresh flowers in the vase. He
hazarded the guess that Mrs. Grove was often in bed until past noon;
here servants renewed the great hot-house roses with long stems, the
elaborate flowers on the dining-table.
In the morning, as he had foreseen, the percolator was connected, cream
and sugar placed beside it; and before his shaving was over, he had a
cup of coffee with a cigarette casting up its fragrant smoke from the
saucer. His shoes might have been lacquered from the heighth of the
lustre rubbed into them; a voice the perfection of trained sympathetic
concern inquired for the exacted details of the suspended preparation
of his eggs.
* * * * *
His dinner engagement with Mina Raff, arranged through her secretary,
was for fifteen minutes past seven; and, meanwhile, as Mrs. Grove had
offered, Adamson drove Lee down-town. The afternoon had nearly gone
before he returned to East Sixty-sixth Street; but the maid at the door
told him that there was tea up in the library. This he found to be a
long gloomy room finished in a style which, he decided, might be
massively Babylonian. A ponderous table for the support of weightless
trifles filled the middle of the rug; there were deep chairs of roan
leather, with an immense sofa like the lounge of a club or steamer; low
bookcases with leaded glass; and windows the upper panes of which were
stained in peacock colors and geometrical design.
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