egan
to gain a general idea of the people among whom he found himself. As in
all other places of resort, one type predominated: people in the prime
of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility in their
appearance, but with little promise of strength or the quality that
makes success. Few were much above thirty, and not a few were still in
their teens. They stood, leaning on tables and shifting on their feet;
sometimes they smoked extraordinarily fast, and sometimes they let
their cigars go out; some talked well, but the conversation of others
was plainly the result of nervous tension, and was equally without wit
or purport. As each new bottle of champagne was opened, there was a
manifest improvement in gaiety. Only two were seated--one in a chair in
the recess of the window, with his head hanging and his hands plunged
deep into his trousers pockets, pale, visibly moist with perspiration,
saying never a word, a very wreck of soul and body; the other sat on the
divan close by the chimney, and attracted notice by a trenchant
dissimilarity from all the rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but
he looked fully ten years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen
a man more naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and
ruinous excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, was partly
paralysed, and wore spectacles of such unusual power that his eyes
appeared through the glasses greatly magnified and distorted in shape.
Except the Prince and the President, he was the only person in the room
who preserved the composure of ordinary life.

There was little decency among the members of the club. Some boasted of
the disgraceful actions, the consequences of which had reduced them to
seek refuge in death; and the others listened without disapproval. There
was a tacit understanding against moral judgments; and whoever passed
the club doors enjoyed already some of the immunities of the tomb. They
drank to each other's memories, and to those of notable suicides in the
past. They compared and developed their different views of death--some
declaring that it was no more than blackness and cessation; others full
of a hope that that very night they should be scaling the stars and
commercing with the mighty dead.

"To the eternal memory of Baron Trenck, the type of suicides!" cried
one. "He went out of a small cell into a smaller, that he might come
forth again to freedom."

"For my part," said a second, "I wish