The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path.  Then suddenly the whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in “Faust” when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it.  Here and there the huge headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the hydrangea bushes.  They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—­so small that the lighted windows were plainly visible from the road.

“Stop,” said Ben to his driver.  He had suddenly realized how long it must be before he could rouse the Cord household.

He paid his driver, got out, and made his way up the driveway toward the house.  Groups of chauffeurs were standing about their cars—­vigorous, smartly dressed men, young for the most part.  Ben wondered if it were possible that they were content with the present arrangement, and whether their wives and children were not stifling in the city at that very moment.  He caught a sentence here and there as he passed.  “And, believe me,” one was saying, “as soon as he got into the box he did not do a thing to that fellar from Tiverton—­” Ben’s footsteps lagged a little.  He was a baseball fan.  He almost forgave the chauffeurs for being content.  They seemed to him human beings, after all.

He approached the house, and, walking past a narrow, unroofed piazza, he found himself opposite a long window.  He looked straight into the ballroom.  The ball was a fancy ball—­the best of the season.  It was called a Balkan Ball, which gave all the guests the opportunity of dressing pretty much as they pleased.  The wood of the long paneled room was golden, and softened the light from the crystal appliques along the wall, and set off the bright dresses of the dancers as a gold bowl sets off the colors of fruit.

Every now and then people stepped out on the piazza, and as they did they became audible to Ben for a few seconds.  First, two middle-aged men, solid, bronzed, laughing rather wickedly together.  Ben drew back, afraid of what he might overhear, but it turned out to be no very guilty secret.  “My dear fellow,” one was saying, “I gave him a stroke a hole, and he’s twenty years younger than I am—­well, fifteen anyhow.  The trouble with these young men is that they lack—­”

Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked.

Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl’s hand gesticulating at her round, red lips.  Ben had no scruples in overhearing them—­theirs appeared to be the universal secret.  But here again he was wrong.  She was saying:  “Round and round—­not up and down.  My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round—­”

Then two young men—­boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they were saying, “I haven’t pitched a game since before the war, but he said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so—­” Ben saw that he was in the presence of the hero of the late game.  He forgave him, too.