then suddenly he began to pay attention.
Mrs. Winnie had a coat of arms; he had noticed it upon her auto, and
again upon the great bronze gates of the Snow Palace, and again upon
the liveries of her footmen, and yet again upon the decanter of Scotch.
And now--incredible and appalling--he observed it branded upon the
delicately browned sweetbread!

After that, who would not have watched? There were large dishes of rare
fruits upon the table--fruits which had been packed in cotton wool and
shipped in cold storage from every corner of the earth. There were
peaches which had come from South Africa (they had cost ten dollars
apiece). There were bunches of Hamburg grapes, dark purple and bursting
fat, which had been grown in a hot-house, wrapped in paper bags. There
were nectarines and plums, and pomegranates and persimmons from Japan,
and later on, little dishes of plump strawberries-raised in pots. There
were quail which had come from Egypt, and a wonderful thing called
"crab-flake a la Dewey," cooked in a chafing-dish, and served with
mushrooms that had been grown in the tunnels of abandoned mines in
Michigan. There was lettuce raised by electric light, and lima beans
that had come from Porto Rico, and artichokes brought from France at a
cost of one dollar each.--And all these extraordinary viands were
washed down by eight or nine varieties of wines, from the cellar of a
man who had made collecting them a fad for the last thirty years, who
had a vineyard in France for the growing of his own champagne, and kept
twenty thousand quarts of claret in storage all the time--and procured
his Rhine wine from the cellar of the German Emperor, at a cost of
twenty-five dollars a quart!

There were twelve people at dinner, and afterward they made two tables
for bridge, leaving Charlie Carter to talk to Alice, and Mrs. Winnie to
devote herself to Montague, according to her promise. "Everybody likes
to see my house," she said. "Would you?" And she led the way from the
dining-room into the great conservatory, which formed a central court
extending to the roof of the building. She pressed a button, and a soft
radiance streamed down from above, in the midst of which Mrs. Winnie
stood, with her shimmering jewels a very goddess of the fire.

The conservatory was a place in which he could have spent the evening;
it was filled with the most extraordinary varieties of plants. "They
were gathered from all over the world," said Mrs. Winnie, see