s a fair young man, with perpetual surprise impinged on
his countenance, and a chin that seemed to have retired from competition
with the rest of his features. The beam of recognition that he had given
to his friend or acquaintance subsided into a subdued but lingering
simper.

"What is the matter?" drawled his neighbour lazily, dropping the end of a
cigarette into a small bowl of water, and helping himself from a silver
case on the table at his side.

"Matter?" said Cornelian, opening wide a pair of eyes in which unhealthy
intelligence seemed to struggle in undetermined battle with utter
vacuity; "why should you suppose that anything is the matter?"

"When you wear a look of idiotic complacency in a Turkish bath," said the
other, "it is the more noticeable from the fact that you are wearing
nothing else."

"Were you at the Shalem House dance last night?" asked Cornelian, by way
of explaining his air of complacent retrospection.

"No," said the other, "but I feel as if I had been; I've been reading
columns about it in the Dawn."

"The last event of the season," said Cornelian, "and quite one of the
most amusing and lively functions that there have been."

"So the Dawn said; but then, as Shalem practically owns and controls that
paper, its favourable opinion might be taken for granted."

"The whole idea of the Revel was quite original," said Cornelian, who was
not going to have his personal narrative of the event forestalled by
anything that a newspaper reporter might have given to the public; "a
certain number of guests went as famous personages in the world's
history, and each one was accompanied by another guest typifying the
prevailing characteristic of that personage. One man went as Julius
Caesar, for instance, and had a girl typifying ambition as his shadow,
another went as Louis the Eleventh, and his companion personified
superstition. Your shadow had to be someone of the opposite sex, you
see, and every alternate dance throughout the evening you danced with
your shadow-partner. Quite a clever idea; young Graf von Schnatelstein
is supposed to have invented it."

"New York will be deeply beholden to him," said the other;
"shadow-dances, with all manner of eccentric variations, will be the rage
there for the next eighteen months."

"Some of the costumes were really sumptuous," continued Cornelian; "the
Duchess of Dreyshire was magnificent as Aholibah, you never saw so many
jewels on one person, only