of draperies, and little gusts of delicate
perfumes floated out, as the hundred or more women settled themselves at
the right angle, all their keen, handsome, nervous faces lifted to the
speaker in a pleasant expectancy. Not only were they agreeably aware
that they were forming part of one of the most recherche events of
Endbury's social life, but they were remembering piquant rumors of M.
Buisine's sensational attacks on American materialism. The afternoon
promised something more interesting than their usual programme of
home-made essays and papers.

Their expectation was not disappointed. In fluent English, apparently
smooth with long practice on the same theme, he wove felicitous and
forceful elaborations on the proverb relating to people who are absent
and the estimation in which they are held by those present. He had seen
in America, he said, everything but the American man. He had seen
hundreds and thousands of women as well-dressed as Parisiennes (and, as
a rule, much more expensively), as self-possessed as English great
ladies, as cultivated as Russian princesses, as universally and
variously handsome as visions in a painter's dream--("He's not afraid of
laying it on thick, is he?" whispered Madeleine with an appreciative
laugh)--but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men.
He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see
them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a
new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told
that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no
clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life,
no knowledge of their children, no interest in education--that, in
short, they left the whole business of worthy living to their wives, and
devoted themselves exclusively to the wild-beast joys of tearing and
rending their business competitors.

He gave many picturesque instances of his contention, he sketched
several lively and amusing portraits of the one or two business men he
had succeeded in running down; their tongue-tied stupefaction before the
ordinary topics of civilization, their scorn of all aesthetic
considerations; their incapacity to conceive of an intellectual life as
worthy a grown man; the Stone-age simplicity with which they referred
everything to savage cunning; their oblivion to any other standard than
"success," by which they meant possessing something