Perhaps it was not an American structure, although one could find in it all the rare woods and stones of the continent.  Great numbers of foreign workmen were employed in its finishing and decoration.  One could wander in it from Pompeii to Japan, from India to Versailles, from Greece to the England of the Tudors, from the Alhambra to colonial Salem.  It was so cosmopolitan that a representative of almost any nationality, ancient or modern, could have been suited in it with an apartment to his taste, and if the interior lacked unity it did not lack a display of variety that appealed to the imagination.  From time to time paragraphs appeared in English, French, and Italian journals, regarding the work of this and that famous artist who was designing a set of furniture or furnishing the drawings of a room, or carving the paneling and statuary, or painting the ceiling of an apartment in the great Palazzo Henderson in New York —­Washington.  The United American Workers (who were half foreigners by birth) passed resolutions denouncing Henderson for employing foreign pauper labor, and organized more than one strike while the house was building.  It was very unpatriotic and un-American to have anything done that could not be done by a member of the Union.  There was a firm of excellent stone-cutters which offered to make all the statuary needed in the house, and set it up in good shape, and when the offer was declined, it memorialized Congress for protection.

Although Henderson gave what time he could spare to the design and erection of the building, it pleased him to call it Margaret’s house, and to see the eagerness with which she entered into its embellishment.  There was something humorous in the enlargement of her ideas since the days when she had wondered at the magnificence of the Washington Square home, and modestly protested against its luxury.  Her own boudoir was a cheap affair compared with that in the new house.

“Don’t you think, dear,” she said, puzzling over the drawings, “that it would better be all sandalwood?  I hate mosaics.  It looks so cheap to have little bits of precious woods stuck about.”

“I should think so.  But what do you do with the ebony?”

“Oh, the ebony and gold?  That is the adjoining sitting-room—­such a pretty contrast.”

“And the teak?”

“It has such a beautiful polish.  That is another room.  Carmen says that will be our sober room, where we go when we want to repent of things.”

“Well, if you have any sandal-wood left over, you can work it into your Boys’ Lodging-house, you know.”

“Don’t be foolish!  And then the ballroom, ninety feet long—­it looks small on the paper.  And do you think we’d better have those life-size figures all round, mediaeval statues, with the incandescents?  Carmen says she would prefer a row of monks—­something piquant about that in a ballroom.  I don’t know that I like the figures, after all; they are too crushing and heavy.”