seamed
and lined, world-worn and old, and his sharp eyes peering from under his
craggy brows with that analyzing, cynical, half-pathetic half-humorous
expression--certainly presented a contrast too striking to escape notice.

For an instant, as comrades side by side upon a battle-field might do,
they glanced over the scene. To the painter's eye, the assembled guests
appeared as a glittering, shimmering, scintillating, cloud-like mass that,
never still, stirred within itself, in slow, graceful restless
motions--forming always, without purpose new combinations and groupings
that were broken up, even as they were shaped, to be reformed; with the
black spots and splashes of the men's conventional dress ever changing
amid the brighter colors and textures of the women's gowns; the warm flesh
tints of bare white arms and shoulders, gleaming here and there; and the
flash and sparkle of jewels, threading the sheen of silks and the filmy
softness of laces. Into the artist's mind--fresh from the tragic
earnestness of his day's work, and still under the enduring spell of his
weeks in the mountains--flashed a sentence from a good old book; "For what
is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and
then vanisheth away."

Then they were greeting, with conventional nothings their beautiful
hostess; who, with a charming air of triumphant--but not too
triumphant--proprietorship received them and passed them on, with a low
spoken word to Aaron King; "I will take charge of you later."

Conrad Lagrange, before they drifted apart, found opportunity to growl in
his companion's ear; "A near-great musician--an actress of divorce court
fame--an art critic, boon companion of our friend Rutlidge--two free-lance
yellow journalists--a poet--with leading culture-club women of various
brands, and a mob of mere fashion and wealth. The pickings should be
good. Look at 'Materialism', over there."

In a wheeled chair, attended by a servant in livery, a little apart from
the center of the scene,--as though the pageant of life was about to move
on without him,--but still, with desperate grip, holding his place in the
picture, sat the genius of it all--the millionaire. The creature's wasted,
skeleton-like limbs, were clothed grotesquely in conventional evening
dress. His haggard, bestial face--repulsive with every mark of his wicked,
licentious years--grinned with an insane determination to take the place
that was his by right of h