in cherry-colored silk and velvet livery; a butler, looking
like an English gentleman, was waiting to receive
them at the top of a short flight of marble steps
between the outer and the inner entrance doors. As
Mildred ascended, she happened to note the sculpturing
over the inner entrance--a reclining nude figure of a
woman, Cupids with garlands and hymeneal torches
hovering about her.

Mildred had been in many pretentious houses in and
near New York, but this far surpassed the grandest of
them. Everything was brand new, seemed to have been
only that moment placed, and was of the costliest-
statuary, carpets, armor, carved seats of stone and
wood, marble staircase rising majestically, tapestries,
pictures, drawing-room furniture. The hall was vast,
but the drawing-room was vaster. Empty, one would
have said that it could not possibly be furnished. Yet
it was not only full, but crowded-chairs and sofas,
hassocks and tete-a-tetes, cabinets, tables, pictures,
statues, busts, palms, flowers, a mighty fireplace in
which, behind enormous and costly andirons, crackled
enormous and costly logs. There was danger in moving
about; one could not be sure of not upsetting something,
and one felt that the least damage that could be
done there would be an appallingly expensive matter.

Before that cavernous fireplace posed General
Siddall. He was a tiny mite of a man with a thin wiry
body supporting the head of a professional barber.