Our bedrooms are marvels.  Mine is immense, with two suites of impossible rococo Louis XV. furniture in it; the richest curtains with heaps of arranged draperies and fringe, grand writing table things, a few embroidered cushions; but no new books, or comfy sofas, or look of cosy anywhere.  The bathrooms to each room are superb; miles beyond one’s ideas of them in general at home.  Tom says he can’t sleep because the embroidered monograms on the pillows and things scratch his cheek, and the lace frills tickle his nose, while he catches his toes in the Venetian insertion in the sheets.  The linen itself is the finest you ever saw, Mamma, and would be too exquisite plain.  Now one knows where all those marvellously over-worked things in the Paris shops go to, and all the wonderful gold incrusted Carlsbad glass.  You meet it here in every house.

The gardens are absurd, as compared with ours in England, but they have far better glass houses and forcing processes and perfection of each plant; because you see even the gardener would feel his had to be just one better than the people’s next door.  They are far prouder of these imported things than their divine natural trees, or the perfectly glorious view over the Hudson, and insisted upon us examining all that, while Mr. Spleist told us how much it all cost and would not let us linger to get the lovely picture of the river and the opposite shore; until Octavia said we had a few greenhouses at home and some fairly fine gardens, but nowhere had we so noble a river or so vast a view, and he seemed to be quite hurt at all that, because he had not bought them, I suppose!  And yet, Mamma, I cannot tell you what kind, nice people the Spleists really are; only the strange quality of boast and application of personal material gain is most extraordinary.

The outside of the house is brownish red sandstone, and is a wonderful mixture of all styles.

There is no room in it where there is any look of what we call “home,” and not one shabby thing.  Mrs. Spleist has a “boudoir”—­and it is a boudoir!  It is as if you went into the best shop and said, “I want a boudoir;” just as you would, “I want a hat,” and paid for it and brought it home with you.  Natalie has a sitting-room, and it is just the same.  They are not quite far enough up yet on the social ladder to have every corner of the establishment done by Duveen, and the result is truly appalling.

The food is wonderful, extraordinarily good; but although the footmen are English they don’t wait anything like as well as if they had remained at home; and Octavia’s old maid, Wilbor, told her the hurly burly downstairs is beyond description; snatching their meals anywhere, with no time or etiquette or housekeeper’s room; all, everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.  And the absolutely disrespectful way they speak of their master and mistress—­machines to make money out of, they seem to think—­perfectly astonished Wilbor, who highly disapproves of it all.  Agnes, having a French woman’s eye to the main chance, says, “N’importe, ici on gagne beaucoup d’argent!” So probably she will leave me before we return.