So there were seven to sit down to the round table in the historic Plate Room.  The curving walls were fitted with a lining of walnut cabinets.  Visible through their leaded-glass doors, were ancient services of gold and silver and pewter.  The table streamed with light, but the faces and cabinets were in shadow....  Directly across from Bedient sat Beth Truba, the most brilliant woman his visioning eyes ever developed.

The sight of her was the perfect stimulus, an elixir too volatile to be drunk, rather to be breathed.  Bedient felt the door of his inner chambers swing open before fragrant winds.  The heart of him became greatly alive, and his brain in grand tune.  It is true, she played upon his faculties, as the Hindus play upon the vina, that strange, sensitive, oriental harp with a dozen strings, of which the musician touches but one.  The other strings through sympathetic vibration furnish an undertone almost like an aeolian harmony.  You must listen in a still place to catch the mystic accompaniment.  So it was in Bedient’s mind.  Beth Truba played upon the single string, and the others glorified her with their shadings.  And the plaint from all humanity was in that undertone, as if to keep him sweet.

She was in white.  “See the slim iceberg with the top afire!” Cairns had whispered, as she entered.  Other lives must explain it, but the Titian hair went straight to his heart.  And those wine-dark eyes, now cryptic black, now suffused with red glows like a night-sky above a prairie-fire, said to him, “Better come over and see if I’m tamable.”

“I can see, it’s just the place I wanted to be to-night,” she said, taking her chair.  “We’re going to have such a good time!”

And Kate Wilkes drawled this comment to Cairns:  “In other words, Beth says, ‘Bring on your lion, for I’m the original wild huntress.’”

Kate Wilkes was a tall tanned woman rather variously weathered, and more draped than dressed.  She conducted departments of large feminine interest in several periodicals, and was noted among the “emancipated and impossible” for her papers on Whitman.  The romantic novelty was Mrs. Wordling, the actress, and the other two women were Vina Nettleton, who made gods out of clay and worshipped Rodin, and Marguerite Grey, tall and lovely in a tragic, flower-like way, who painted, and played the ’cello.

“Meeting Bedient this time has been an experience to me,” Cairns said, toward the end of dinner.  “I called together the very finest people I knew, because of that.  He had sailed for ten years before I knew him.  That was nearly thirteen years ago.  Not that there’s anything in miles, nor sailing about from port to port....  He has ridden for the English since, through the great Himalayan forests—­years so strange that he forgot their passing....  We are all good friends; in a sense, artists, together, so I can say things.  One wants to be pretty sure when one lets go from the inside.  I didn’t realize before how rarely this happens with us.