Vandover arrived at Ida’s house that night at about eight o’clock in the midst of a drenching fog.  The parlour and front room on the second floor were furnished with bay windows decorated with some meaningless sort of millwork.  The front door stood at the right of the parlour windows.  Two Corinthian pillars on either side of the vestibule supported a balcony; these pillars had iron capitals which were painted to imitate the wood of the house, which in its turn was painted to imitate stone.  The house was but two stories high, and the roof was topped with an iron cresting.  There was a microscopical front yard in which one saw a tiny gravel walk, two steps long, that led to a door under the front steps, where the gas-meter was kept.  A few dusty and straggling calla-lilies grew about.

Ida opened the door for Vandover almost as soon as he rang, and pulled him into the entry, exclaiming:  “Come in out of the wet, as the whale said to Jonah. Isn’t it a nasty night?” Vandover noticed as he came in that the house smelt of upholstery, cooking, and turpentine.  He did not take off his overcoat, but went with her into the parlour.

The parlour was a little room with tinted plaster walls shut off from the “back-parlour” by sliding doors.  A ply carpet covered the floor, a cheap piano stood across one corner of the room, and a greenish sofa across another.  The mantelpiece was of white marble with gray spots; on one side of it stood an Alaskan “grass basket” full of photographs, and on the other an inverted section of a sewer-pipe painted with daisies and full of gilded cat-tails tied with a blue ribbon.  Near the piano straddled a huge easel of imitation brass up-holding the crayon picture of Ida’s baby sister enlarged from a photograph.  Across one corner of this picture was a yellow “drape.”  There were a great many of these “drapes” all about the room, hanging over the corners of the chairs, upon an edge of the mantelpiece, and even twisted about the chandelier.  In the exact middle of the mantelpiece itself was the clock, one of the chief ornaments of the room, almost the first thing one saw upon entering; it was a round-faced timepiece perversely set in one corner of an immense red plush palette; the palette itself was tilted to one side, and was upheld by an easel of twisted brass wire.  Out of the thumb-hole stuck half a dozen brushes wired together in a round bunch and covered with gilt paint.  The clock never was wound.  It went so fast that it was useless as a timepiece.  Over it, however, hung a large and striking picture, a species of cheap photogravure, a lion lying in his cage, looking mildly at the spectator over his shoulder.  In front of the picture were real iron bars, with real straw tucked in behind them.

Ida sat down on the piano stool, twisting back and forth, leaning her elbows on the keys.

“All the folks have gone out to a whist-party, and I’m left all alone in the house with Maggie,” she said.  Then she added:  “Bessie and Bandy Ellis said they would come down to-night, and I thought we could all go downtown to the Tivoli or somewhere, in the open-air boxes, you know, way up at the top.”  Hardly had she spoken the words when Bessie and Ellis arrived.