At seven o’clock that evening Peter strolled
up to the magic bronze doors, and touched them; and
sure enough, the blue-uniformed guardians drew them
back without a word, and the tiny brass-button imps
never even glanced at Peter as he strode up to the
desk and asked for Mr. Lackman.
The haughty clerk passed him on to a still more haughty
telephone operator, who condescended to speak into
her trumpet, and then informed him that Mr. Lackman
was out; he had left word that he would return at
eight. Peter was about to go out and wander about
the streets for an hour, when he suddenly remembered
that everybody else was bluffing; so he marched across
the lobby and seated himself in one of the huge leather
arm-chairs, big enough to hold three of him.
There he sat, and continued to sit—and nobody
said a word!
Yes, this was Mount Olympus, and here were the gods:
the female ones in a state of divine semi-nudity,
the male ones mostly clad in black coats with pleated
shirt-fronts puffing out. Every time one of them
moved up to the desk Peter would watch and wonder,
was this Mr. Lackman? He might have been able
to pick out a millionaire from an ordinary crowd;
but here every male god was got up for the precise
purpose of looking like a millionaire, so Peter’s
job was an impossible one.
In front of him across the lobby floor there arose
a ten-foot pillar to a far-distant roof. This
pillar was of pale, green-streaked marble, and Peter’s
eyes followed it to the top, where it exploded in
a snow-white cloud-burst, full of fascination.
There were four cornucopias, one at each corner, and
out of each cornucopia came tangled ropes of roses,
and out of these roses came other ropes, with what
appeared to be apples and leaves, and still more roses,
and still more emerging ropes, spreading in a tangle
over the ceiling. Here and there, in the midst
of all this splendor, was the large, placidly smiling
face of a boy angel; four of these placidly smiling
boy angels gazed from the four sides of the snow-white
cloud-burst, and Peter’s eye roamed from one
to another, fascinated by the mathematics of this
architectural marvel. There were fourteen columns
in a row, and four such rows in the lobby. That
made fifty-six columns in all, or two hundred and
twenty-four boy angels’ heads. How many
cornucopias and how many roses and how many apples
it meant, defied all calculation. The boy angels’
heads were exactly alike, every head with the same
size and quality of smile; and Peter marvelled—how
many days would it take a sculptor to carve the details
of two hundred and twenty-four boy angel smiles?
