t ten or eleven, when they would
burst out of every exit, rending the night with their yells, while a
congested mass of motors and taxi-cabs shrieked and honked and squealed
and coughed; and then abruptly the silence of death would fall upon
what is now a business quarter where only an occasional hotel or little
old brownstone house--sole reminder of a vanished past when Madison
Square was the centre of fashion--lingered between the towering masses
of concrete and steel.

IX

When Clavering and Dinwiddie arrived at the Ogden house Judge Trent was
already there and mixing cocktails in the library. He was a large man
who must have had a superb figure before it grew heavy. He wore the
moustache of his generation and in common with what was left of his hair
it glistened like crystal. His black eyes were still very bright and his
full loose mouth wore the slight smirk peculiar to old men whose sex
vanity perishes only in the grave. Beside him stood a man some ten years
younger who was in the graying period, which gave him a somewhat dried
and dusty look; but whose figure was still slender and whose hard
outlines of face were as yet unblurred by flesh. They were, of course,
faultlessly groomed, but if met in the wilds of Africa, clad in rags and
bearded like the jungle, to the initiate they still would have been New
Yorkers.

"Come in! Come in!" cried the Judge heartily. "Madame Zattiany will be
down in a minute--she prefers to be called Madame Zattiany, by the way.
Thinks titles in America are absurd unless wearers were born to
them--more particularly since continental titles today are worth about as
much as rubles and marks. . . . Mr. Clavering, you know Mr. Osborne?
Madame Zattiany kindly permitted me to bring him as she was having a
little party. Families old friends."

Clavering placed two fingers in the limp hand extended and met the cold
appraising eye calmly. The New York assumption that all other Americans
are rank outsiders, that, in short, not to have been born in New York is
a social and irremediable crime, had often annoyed him but never caused
him to feel the slightest sense of inferiority. He had his own
ancestors, as important in their day as any bewigged old Dutchmen--all of
whom, he reminded himself, had been but honest burghers in Holland. But
he admired their consistency. The rest of the country had been
commenting bitterly on the New York attitude since the eighteenth
century. And