The door to the Higbee domain is of polished mahogany, set between lights of antique verte Italian glass, and bearing an ancient brass knocker. From the reception-room, with its walls of green empire silk, one passes through a foyer hall, of Cordova leather hangings, to the drawing-room with its three broad windows. Opposite the entrance to this superb room is a mantel of carved Caen stone, faced with golden Pavanazza marble, with old Roman andirons of gold ending in the fleur-de-lis. The walls are hung with blue Florentine silk, embossed in silver. Beyond a bronze grill is the music-room, a library done in Austrian oak with stained burlap panelled by dull-forged nails, a conservatory, a billiard-room, a smoking-room. This latter has walls of red damask and a mantel with "_Post Tenebras Lux_" cut into one of its marble panels,--a legend at which the worthy lessee of all this splendour is wont often to glance with respectful interest.
The admirable host--if one be broad-minded--is now in the drawing-room, seconding his worthy wife and pretty daughter who welcome the dinner-guests.
For a man who has a fad for ham and doesn't care who knows it, his bearing is all we have a right to expect that it should be. Among the group of arrivals, men of his own sort, he is speaking of the ever-shifting fashion in beards, to the evangel of a Texas oil-field who flaunts to the world one of those heavy moustaches spuriously extended below the corners of the mouth by means of the chin-growth of hair. Another, a worthy tribesman from Snohomish, Washington, wears a beard which, for a score of years, has been let to be its own true self; to express, fearlessly, its own unique capacity for variation from type. These two have rallied their host upon his modishly trimmed side-whiskers.
"You're right," says Mr. Higbee, amiably, "I ain't stuck any myself on this way of trimming up a man's face, but the madam will have it this way--says it looks more refined and New Yorky. And now, do you know, ever since I've wore 'em this way--ever since I had 'em scraped from around under my neck here--I have to go to Florida every winter. Come January or February, I get bronchitis every blamed year!"
Two of the guests only are alien to the barbaric throng.