om the city. Or a whole theatrical company would be
brought down to give an entertainment in the theatre; or a minstrel
show, or a troupe of acrobats, or a menagerie of trained animals. Or
perhaps there would be a great pianist, or a palmist, or a trance
medium. Anyone at all would be welcome who could bring a new thrill--it
mattered nothing at all, though the price might be several hundred
dollars a minute.

Montague shook hands with his host and hostess, and with a number of
others; among them Billy Price who forthwith challenged him, and
carried him off to the shooting-gallery. Here he took a rifle, and
proceeded to satisfy her as to his skill. This brought him to the
notice of Siegfried Harvey, who was a famous cross-country rider and
"polo-man." Harvey's father owned a score of copper-mines, and had
named him after a race-horse; he was a big broad-shouldered fellow, a
favourite of every one; and next morning, when he found that Montague
sat a horse like one who was born to it, he invited him to come out to
his place on Long Island, and see some of the fox-hunting.

Then, after he had dressed for dinner, Montague came downstairs, and
found Betty Wyman, shining like Aurora in an orange-coloured cloud. She
introduced him to Mrs. Vivie Patton, who was tall and slender and
fascinating, and had told her husband to go to hell. Mrs. Vivie had
black eyes that snapped and sparkled, and she was a geyser of animation
in a perpetual condition of eruption. Montague wondered if she would
have talked with him so gaily had she known what he knew about her
domestic entanglements.

The company moved into the dining-room, where there was served another
of those elaborate and enormously expensive meals which he concluded he
was fated to eat for the rest of his life. Only, instead of Mrs. Billy
Alden with her Scotch, there was Mrs. Vivie, who drank champagne in
terrifying quantities; and afterward there was the inevitable grouping
of the bridge fiends.

Among the guests there was a long-haired and wild-looking foreign
personage, who was the "lion" of the evening, and sat with half a dozen
admiring women about him. Now he was escorted to the music-room, and
revealed the fact that he was a violin virtuoso. He played what was
called "salon music"--music written especially for ladies and gentlemen
to listen to after dinner; and also a strange contrivance called a
concerto, put together to enable the player to exhibit within a brief
spa