It was merely to avoid saying how warm the room
was, and how pleasant the party was, facts upon which we had already
enlarged. "Yes, they are pretty pictures; but la! how long it must have
taken Mr. Duesseldorf to paint them all;" was the reply.
By the Farnesian Hercules! no Roman sylph in her city's decline would
ever have called the sun-god, Mr. Apollo. We hope that houri melted
entirely away in the window; but we certainly did not stay to see.
Passing out toward the supper-room we encountered two young men. "What,
Hal," said one, "_you_ at Mrs. Potiphar's?" It seems that Hal was a
sprig of one of the "old families." "Well, Joe," said Hal, a little
confused, "it _is_ a little strange. The fact is I didn't mean to be
here, but I concluded to compromise by coming, _and not being introduced
to the host_." Hal could come, eat Potiphar's supper, drink his wines,
spoil his carpets, laugh at his fashionable struggles, and affect the
puppyism of a foreign lord, because he disgraced the name of a man who
had done some service somewhere, while Potiphar was only an honest man
who made a fortune.
The supper-room was a pleasant place.
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