The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably crowded; altogether that assembly must have numbered many thousands.  They were brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men as fancifully as the women, for the sobering influence of the Puritan conception of dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away.  The hair of the men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from the earth.  Frizzy straight-cut masses that would have charmed Rossetti abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the mysterious title of an “amorist,” wore his hair in two becoming plaits a la Marguerite.  The pigtail was in evidence; it would seem that citizens of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed of their race.  There was little uniformity of fashion apparent in the forms of clothing worn.  The more shapely men displayed their symmetry in trunk hose, and here were puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and there a robe.  The fashions of the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps the prevailing influence, but the aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent.  Masculine embonpoint, which, in Victorian times, would have been subjected to the buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged tight-armed evening dress, now formed but the basis of a wealth of dignity and drooping folds.  Graceful slenderness abounded also.  To Graham, a typically stiff man from a typically stiff period, not only did these men seem altogether too graceful in person, but altogether too expressive in their vividly expressive faces.  They gesticulated, they expressed surprise, interest, amusement, above all, they expressed the emotions excited in their minds by the ladies about them with astonishing frankness.  Even at the first glance it was evident that women were in a great majority.

The ladies in the company of these gentlemen displayed in dress, bearing and manner alike, less emphasis and more intricacy.  Some affected a classical simplicity of robing and subtlety of fold, after the fashion of the First French Empire, and flashed conquering arms and shoulders as Graham passed.  Others had closely-fitting dresses without seam or belt at the waist, sometimes with long folds falling from the shoulders.  The delightful confidences of evening dress had not been diminished by the passage of two centuries.

Everyone’s movements seemed graceful.  Graham remarked to Lincoln that he saw men as Raphael’s cartoons walking, and Lincoln told him that the attainment of an appropriate set of gestures was part of every rich person’s education.  The Master’s entry was greeted with a sort of tittering applause, but these people showed their distinguished manners by not crowding upon him nor annoying him by any persistent scrutiny, as he descended the steps towards the floor of the aisle.