The spacious entrance hall is brilliantly lighted, and on either hand
wide-open doors give admission to long suites of richly, tastefully
furnished rooms, beautiful with rare statuary, paintings, articles of
vertu, and flowers scattered everywhere, in bouquets, wreaths, festoons,
filling the air with their delicious fragrance.
These apartments, waiting for the guests, are almost entirely deserted;
but in Elsie's dressing-room a bevy of gay young girls, in white tarletan
and with flowers in their elaborately dressed hair, are laughing and
chatting merrily, and now and then offering a suggestion to Aunt Chloe and
Dinah, whose busy hands are arranging their young mistress for her bridal.
"Lovely!" "Charming!" "Perfect!" the girls exclaim in delighted, admiring
chorus, as the tirewomen having completed their labors, Elsie stands
before them in a dress of the richest white satin, with an overskirt of
point lace, a veil of the same, enveloping her slender figure like an airy
cloud, or morning mist, reaching from the freshly gathered orange blossoms
wreathed in the shining hair to the tiny white satin slipper just peeping
from beneath the rich folds of the dress. Flowers are her only ornament
to-night, and truly she needs no other.
"Perfect! nothing superfluous, nothing wanting," says Lottie King.
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