Polly Pleyden and Elsie Brewster entered into her plans with enthusiasm (neither Mrs. Pleyden nor Mr. Donald was consulted), and Bylant, who was feeling somewhat exhausted after weeks of house-hunting and furnishing, and speculating with alternate gloom and hope on his future, looked forward to the occasion as one more ordeal to be endured. He should have to submit to congratulations in company with Gita for the first time, for she had attended no more dinners in Chelsea; and he had been able to dodge felicitations himself for the most part, as his time had been fully occupied in New York. Gita had gone to the Pleyden apartment for several days every week (chaperoned by the aunt) and together they had found a charming old red brick house with white trimmings in West Twelfth Street. It had been renovated by its last owner, who had decided to move uptown, and there was little for Bylant to do but send his own things to the third story, and “stand round” while Gita, who rarely asked his advice, chose rugs and furniture for the two lower floors. Elsie, after she finished her book, undertook the prosaic commission of furnishing the kitchen and the servants’ rooms in the extension. Gita bought the narrowest brass bedstead she could find, as a contrast, she gayly told Bylant, to her prevailing four-posters, and had her room done up in yellow that it might the more surely reflect the sunlight that streamed through the large southern windows. The chairs and curtains were of chintz and the only pieces of manor furniture were a tulipwood chest, with each of the drawers painted in different design and soft faded colors, and a day-bed she found in the attic; both built in the late seventeenth century. There was no spare bedroom, and the day-bed, its head manipulated by chains, was to offer its inhospitable surface to Elsie whenever she spent a night in New York. Otherwise it was a chaise longue piled with cushions. Her sitting-room, adjoining, she furnished almost entirely from the manor: with a tavern table (reclaimed from the stables), a pond-lily box with raised carving, an oak box with two rows of arched flutes, a secretary with a single-arch molding and ball feet, two paneled chairs from the dining-room, several Windsor chairs and two new ones for comfort, a pine-paneled settle with a high back, and a Dutch marriage-chest from the house in Albany. The curtains in the manor house were faded and mended, but many of the fine old rugs were in good condition and she sent over a pale Aubusson, ordered curtains of artichoke-green pongee, and had the walls tinted in harmony.