og. The parlour and front room on the second floor
were furnished with bay windows decorated with some meaningless sort of
millwork. The front door stood at the right of the parlour windows. Two
Corinthian pillars on either side of the vestibule supported a balcony;
these pillars had iron capitals which were painted to imitate the wood
of the house, which in its turn was painted to imitate stone. The house
was but two stories high, and the roof was topped with an iron cresting.
There was a microscopical front yard in which one saw a tiny gravel
walk, two steps long, that led to a door under the front steps, where
the gas-meter was kept. A few dusty and straggling calla-lilies grew
about.

Ida opened the door for Vandover almost as soon as he rang, and pulled
him into the entry, exclaiming: "Come in out of the wet, as the whale
said to Jonah. _Isn't_ it a nasty night?" Vandover noticed as he came in
that the house smelt of upholstery, cooking, and turpentine. He did not
take off his overcoat, but went with her into the parlour.

The parlour was a little room with tinted plaster walls shut off from
the "back-parlour" by sliding doors. A ply carpet covered the floor, a
cheap piano stood across one corner of the room, and a greenish sofa
across another. The mantelpiece was of white marble with gray spots; on
one side of it stood an Alaskan "grass basket" full of photographs, and
on the other an inverted section of a sewer-pipe painted with daisies
and full of gilded cat-tails tied with a blue ribbon. Near the piano
straddled a huge easel of imitation brass up-holding the crayon picture
of Ida's baby sister enlarged from a photograph. Across one corner of
this picture was a yellow "drape." There were a great many of these
"drapes" all about the room, hanging over the corners of the chairs,
upon an edge of the mantelpiece, and even twisted about the chandelier.
In the exact middle of the mantelpiece itself was the clock, one of the
chief ornaments of the room, almost the first thing one saw upon
entering; it was a round-faced timepiece perversely set in one corner of
an immense red plush palette; the palette itself was tilted to one
side, and was upheld by an easel of twisted brass wire. Out of the
thumb-hole stuck half a dozen brushes wired together in a round bunch
and covered with gilt paint. The clock never was wound. It went so fast
that it was useless as a timepiece. Over it, however, hung a large and
striking picture,