The artist laughed.  “To tell the truth, I don’t feel exactly at home.  But what the deuce can I do?  After my intimacy with them, all these months, I can’t assume that they are going to make my picture a reason for refusing to recognize me, can I?  As I see it, they, not I, must take the initiative.  I can’t say:  ’Well, I’ve told the truth about you, so throw me out’.”

The novelist grinned.  “Thus it is when ‘Art’ becomes entangled with the family of ‘Materialism.’  It’s hard to break away from the flesh-pots—­even when you know you are on the road to the Promised Land.  But don’t worry—­’The Age’ will take the initiative fast enough when she sees your portrait of her.  Wow!  In the meantime, let’s play their game to-night, and take what spoils the gods may send.  There will be material here for pictures and stories a plenty.”  As they went up the wide steps and under the portal into the glare of the lights, and caught the sound of the voices within, he added under his breath, “Lord, man, but ’tis a pretty show!—­if only things were called by their right names.  That old Babylonian, Belshazzar, had nothing on us moderns after all, did he?  Watch out for the writing upon the wall.”

When Aaron King and his companion entered the spacious rooms where the pride of Fairlands Heights and the eastern lions were assembled, a buzz of comment went round the glittering company.  Aside from the fact that Mrs. Taine, with practised skill, had prepared the way for her protege, by subtly stimulating the curiosity of her guests—­the appearance of the two men, alone, would have attracted their attention The artist, with his strong, splendidly proportioned, athletic body, and his handsome, clean-cut intellectual face—­calmly sure of himself—­with the air of one who knows that his veins are rich with the wealth of many generations of true culture and refinement; and the novelist—­easily the most famous of his day—­tall, emaciated, grotesquely stooped—­with his homely face seamed and lined, world-worn and old, and his sharp eyes peering from under his craggy brows with that analyzing, cynical, half-pathetic half-humorous expression—­certainly presented a contrast too striking to escape notice.

For an instant, as comrades side by side upon a battle-field might do, they glanced over the scene.  To the painter’s eye, the assembled guests appeared as a glittering, shimmering, scintillating, cloud-like mass that, never still, stirred within itself, in slow, graceful restless motions—­forming always, without purpose new combinations and groupings that were broken up, even as they were shaped, to be reformed; with the black spots and splashes of the men’s conventional dress ever changing amid the brighter colors and textures of the women’s gowns; the warm flesh tints of bare white arms and shoulders, gleaming here and there; and the flash and sparkle of jewels, threading the sheen of silks and the filmy softness of laces.  Into the artist’s mind—­fresh from the tragic earnestness of his day’s work, and still under the enduring spell of his weeks in the mountains—­flashed a sentence from a good old book; “For what is your life?  It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”