For the gossips there were
the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables,
and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.
It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that
the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension
of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a
reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown
palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted
interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs.
Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would
have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was
because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.
Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function
in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the
hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty.
Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia,
little Mrs. Blount looked about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled
to him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for her centre-rush
to wedge a way through the crowded rooms, was presently lost to
sight--at least from Miss Anners's point of view.
Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of her appearance at the
hostess's end of the long receiving-line, the senator's wife had been
marked and followed in her slow progress through the rooms by a
thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying to hunch himself into
better relations with his ill-fitting dress-coat, an eager gentleman
whose hawk-like eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her hand
on Gantry's arm.
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