ls in his time, but
many more were attracted by his fame.

Eugene knew intimately and pleasantly most of the artistic and
intellectual figures of his day. In his home and at his table there
appeared artists, publishers, grand opera stars, actors and playwrights.
His large salary, for one thing, his beautiful apartment and its
location, his magnificent office and his friendly manner all conspired
to assist him. It was his self-conscious boast that he had not changed.
He liked nice people, simple people, natural people he said, for these
were the really great ones, but he could not see how far he had come in
class selection. Now he naturally gravitated to the wealthy, the
reputed, the beautiful, the strong and able, for no others interested
him. He hardly saw them. If he did it was to pity or give alms.

It is difficult to indicate to those who have never come out of poverty
into luxury, or out of comparative uncouthness into refinement, the veil
or spell which the latter comes eventually to cast over the
inexperienced mind, coloring the world anew. Life is apparently
striving, constantly, to perfect its illusions and to create spells.
There are, as a matter of fact, nothing but these outside that ultimate
substance or principle which underlies it all. To those who have come
out of inharmony, harmony is a spell, and to those who have come out of
poverty, luxury is a dream of delight. Eugene, being primarily a lover
of beauty, keenly responsive to all those subtleties of perfection and
arrangement which ingenuity can devise, was taken vastly by the nature
of this greater world into which, step by step apparently, he was almost
insensibly passing. Each new fact which met his eye or soothed his
sensibilities was quickly adjusted to all that had gone before. It
seemed to him as though all his life he had naturally belonged to this
perfect world of which country houses, city mansions, city and country
clubs, expensive hotels and inns, cars, resorts, beautiful women,
affected manners, subtlety of appreciation and perfection of appointment
generally were the inherent concomitants. This was the true heaven--that
material and spiritual perfection on earth, of which the world was
dreaming and to which, out of toil, disorder, shabby ideas, mixed
opinions, non-understanding and all the ill to which the flesh is heir,
it was constantly aspiring.

Here was no sickness, no weariness apparently, no ill health or untoward
circumstances