A car load of orchids and gardenias came up, fairly depleting the
florists' shops on Manhattan Island, and with them came a small army
of skilled decorators. In order to deliver his guests at the doors of
Blitherwood, so to speak, the incomprehensible Mr. Blithers had a
temporary spur of track laid from the station two miles away,
employing no fewer than a thousand men to do the work in forty-eight
hours. (Work on a terminal extension in New York was delayed for a
week or more in order that he might borrow the rails, ties and
worktrains!)
Two hundred and fifty precious and skillfully selected guests ate two
hundred and fifty gargantuan dinners and twice as many suppers; drank
barrels of the rarest of wines; smoked countless two dollar Perfectos
and stuffed their pockets with enough to last them for days to come;
burnt up five thousand cigarettes and ate at least two dozen eggs for
breakfast, and then flitted away with a thousand complaints in two
hundred and fifty Pullman drawing-rooms, Nothing could have been more
accurately pulled-off than the wonderful Blitherwood ball.
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