to recognize their parents as they did or had when
confronted by them. Horrible! There were most heavily illustrated and
tearful Sunday articles, all blazoned forth with pictures of his house
and studio, his banks, cars, yacht, groups of guests, while the motives
of those who produced the parents were overlooked. The pictures of the
parents confronting X---- and his sister portrayed very old and feeble
people, and were rather moving. They insisted that they were his parents
and wept brokenly in their hands. But why? And he denying it! His
sister, who resented all this bitterly and who stood by him valiantly,
repudiated, for his sake of course, his and her so-called parents and
friends.

I never saw such a running to cover of "friends" in all my life. Of all
those I had seen about his place and in his company, scores on scores of
people reasonably well known in the arts, the stage, the worlds of
finance and music, all eating his dinners, riding in his cars, drinking
his wines, there was scarcely any one now who knew him anything more
than "casually" or "slightly"--oh, so slightly! When rumors as to the
midnight suppers, the Bacchic dancing, the automobile parties to his
great country place and the spirited frolics which occurred there began
to get abroad, there was no one whom I knew who had ever been there or
knew anything about him or them. For instance, of all the people who had
been close or closest and might therefore have been expected to be
friendly and deeply concerned was de Shay, his fidus Achates and
literally his pensioner--yet de Shay was almost the loudest in his
denunciation or at least deprecation of X----, his habits and methods!
Although it was he who had told me of Mme. ---- and her relation to
X----, who urged me to come here, there and the other place, especially
where X---- was the host, always assuring me that it would be so
wonderful and that X---- was really such a great man, so generous, so
worth-while, he was now really the loudest or at least the most
stand-offish in his comments, pretending never to have been very close
to X----, and lifting his eyebrows in astonishment as though he had not
even guessed what he had actually engineered. His "Did-you-hears,"
"Did-you-knows" and "Wouldn't-have-dreamed" would have done credit to a
tea-party. He was so shocked, especially at X----'s robbing poor
children and orphans, although in so far as my reading of the papers
went I could find nothing that we