by a spelter vase to one of the marble mantles,
for there were two, recorded a moment of the aesthetic craze which had
ceased before it got farther amidst the earlier and honester ugliness
of the room. The gas-fixtures were of the vine-leaf and grape-cluster
bronze-age; some of the garlands which ought to have been attached to
the burners, hung loose from the parent stem, without the effort on the
part of any witness to complete the artistic intention. In the evening,
the lady-boarders received their gentlemen-callers in the parlor; their
lady-callers were liable at all times to be asked if they would not
like to go to the boarders' rooms, and whether they expressed this
preference or not, they were directed where to find them by the maid,
who then rapidly disappeared down the kitchen stairs.

In fact, the door-service at Mrs. Montgomery's was something she would
probably have deprecated if any one had asked her to do so. It was the
charge of a large, raw-boned Irish girl, who made up by her athletic
physique and her bass voice for the want of a man-servant on the
premises. She brow-beat visitors into acceptance of the theory that the
persons they came to see were not at home, especially if they showed
signs of intending to wait in the parlor while she went upstairs to
find out. Those who suffered from her were of the sex least fitted to
combat her. The gentlemen boarders seldom had callers; when they had,
their callers did not ask whether their friends were in or not; they
went and saw for themselves.

The gentlemen at Mrs. Montgomery's were fewer than the ladies, and they
were for several reasons in greater favor. For one thing they gave less
trouble: they had a less lively fear of mice, and they were not so apt
to be out of health and to want their meals sent up; they ate more, but
they did not waste so much, and they never did any sort of washing in
their rooms. Cornelia did not know who or what some of them were; but
she made sure of a theatrical manager; two or three gentlemen in
different branches of commerce; a newspaper writer of some sort, and an
oldish gentleman who had been with Mrs. Montgomery a great while, and
did not seem to be anything but a gentleman boarder, pure and simple.
They were all very civil and quiet, and they bore with the amiable
American fortitude the hardships of the common lot at Mrs.
Montgomery's, which Cornelia underwent ignorantly as necessary
incidents of life in New York.

She no