His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth
Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of
black walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to
his guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of
Aubusson carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the
Niagara--the Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in
Rome twenty years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson--" by token of
which he passed for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and
a poem had once been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty
"On a picture in the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."
Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal
liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit
old Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and
die in the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor.
It was only in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty
revived, and Mrs.
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