The Mavick mansion was on Fifth Avenue in the neighborhood of Central Park.  It was one of the buildings in the city that strangers were always taken to see.  In fact, this was a palace not one kind of a palace, but all kinds of a palace.  The clever and ambitious architect of the house had grouped all the styles of architecture he had ever seen, or of which he had seen pictures.  Here was not an architectural conception, like a sonnet or a well-constructed novel, but if all the work could have been spread out in line, in all its variety, there would have been produced a panorama.  The sight of the mansion always caused wonder and generally ignorant admiration.  Its vastness and splendor were felt to be somehow typical of the New World and of the cosmopolitan city.

The cost, in the eyes of the spectators, was a great part of its merits.  No doubt this was a fabulous sum.  “You can form a little idea of it,” said a gentleman to his country friend, “when I tell you that that little bit there, that little corner of carving and decoration, cost two hundred thousand dollars!  I had this from the architect himself.”

“My!”

The interior was as fully representative of wealth and of the ambition to put under one roof all the notable effects of all the palaces in the world.  But it had, what most palaces have not, all the requisites for luxurious living.  The variety of styles in the rooms was bewildering.  Artists of distinction, both foreign and native, had vied with each other in the decoration of the rooms given over to the display of their genius.  All paganism and all Christianity, history, myth, and the beauties of nature were spread upon the walls and ceilings.  Rare woods, rare marbles, splendid textures, the product of ancient handiwork and modern looms, added a certain dignity to the more airy creations of the artists.  Many of the rooms were named from the nations whose styles of decoration and furnishing were imitated in them, but others had the simple designation of the gold room, the silver room, the lapis-lazuli room, and so on.  It was not only the show-rooms, the halls, passages, stairways, and galleries (both of pictures and of curios) that were thus enriched, but the boudoirs, retiring-rooms, and more private apartments as well.  It was not simply a house of luxury, but of all the comfort that modern invention can furnish.  It was said that the money lavished upon one or two of the noble apartments would have built a State-house (though not at Albany), and that the fireplace in the great hall cost as much as an imitation mediaeval church.  These were the things talked about, and yet the portions of this noble edifice, rich as they were, habitually occupied by the family had another character—­the attractions and conveniences of what we call a home.  Mrs. Mavick used to say that in her apartments she found refuge in a sublimated domesticity.  Mavick’s own quarters—­not the study off the library where he received visitors whom it was necessary to impress—­had an executive appearance, and were, in the necessary appliances, more like the interior bureau of a board of trade.  In fact, the witty brokers who were admitted to its mysteries called it the bucket-shop.