Somehow they had come with the expectation of being bored.  Curiosity prompted them to accept, but it did not prevent the subsequent inevitable lassitude.  Socially Monty Brewster had yet to make himself felt.  He and his dinners were something to talk:  about, but they were accepted hesitatingly, haltingly.  People wondered how he had secured the cooperation of Mrs. Dan, but then Mrs. Dan always did go in for a new toy.  To her was inevitably attributed whatever success the dinner achieved.  And it was no small measure.  Yet there was nothing startling about the affair.  Monty had decided to begin conservatively.  He did the conventional thing, but he did it well.  He added a touch or two of luxury, the faintest aroma of splendor.  Pettingill had designed the curiously wayward table, with its comfortable atmosphere of companionship, and arranged its decoration of great lavender orchids and lacy butterfly festoons of white ones touched with yellow.  He had wanted to use dahlias in their many rich shades from pale yellow to orange and deep red, but Monty held out for orchids.  It was the artist, too, who had found in a rare and happy moment the massive gold candelabra—­ancient things of a more luxurious age—­and their opalescent shades.  Against his advice the service, too, was of gold,—­“rank vulgarity,” he called it, with its rich meaningless ornamentation.  But here Monty was obdurate.  He insisted that he liked the color and that porcelain had no character.  Mrs. Dan only prevented a quarrel by suggesting that several courses should be served upon Sevres.

Pettingill’s scheme for lighting the room was particularly happy.  For the benefit of his walls and the four lovely Monets which Monty had purchased at his instigation, he had designed a ceiling screen of heavy rich glass in tones of white that grew into yellow and dull green.  It served to conceal the lights in the daytime, and at night the glare of electricity was immensely softened and made harmonious by passing through it.  It gave a note of quiet to the picture, which caused even these men and women, who had been here and there and seen many things, to draw in their breath sharply.  Altogether the effect manifestly made an impression.

Such an environment had its influence upon the company.  It went far toward making the dinner a success.  From far in the distance came the softened strains of Hungarian music, and never had the little band played the “Valse Amoureuse” and the “Valse Bleue” with the spirit it put into them that night.  Yet the soft clamor in the dining-room insistently ignored the emotion of the music.  Monty, bored as he was between the two most important dowagers at the feast, wondered dimly what invisible part it played in making things go.  He had a vagrant fancy that without it there would have been no zest for talk, no noisy competition to overcome, no hurdles to leap.  As it was, the talk certainly went well, and Mrs. Dan inspected the result of her work from time to time with smiling satisfaction.  From across the table she heard Colonel Drew’s voice,—­“Brewster evidently objects to a long siege.  He is planning to carry us by assault”