Here and there, in premonition of the eventual, the comet-like passage of streaming confetti was blocked by bare arms upflung to shield laughing faces; arms that flashed with splendid jewels on wrist and finger.

Neville, coolly surveying the room, recognised many, responding to recognition with a laugh, a gesture, or with glass uplifted.

“Stop making goo-goos,” cried Mazie, dropping her hand over his wrist.  “Listen, and I’ll be imprudent enough to tell you the very latest toast—­” She leaned nearer, opening her fan with a daring laugh; but Ogilvy wouldn’t have it.

“This is no time for single sentiment!” he shouted.  “Everybody should be perfectly plural to-night—­everything should be plural, multiple, diffuse, all embracing, general, polydipsiatic, polygynyatic, polyandryatic!”

[Illustration:  Mazie Gray.]

“What’s polyandryatic?” demanded Mazie in astonishment.

“It means everybody is everybody else’s!  I’m yours and you’re mine but everybody else owns us and we own everybody.”

“Hurrah!” shouted Annan.  “Hear—­hear!  Where is the fair and total stranger who is going to steal the first kiss from me?  Somebody count three before the rush begins—­”

A ball of roses struck him squarely on the mouth; a furious shower of confetti followed.  For a few moments the volleys became general, then the wild interchange of civilities subsided, and the cries of laughter died away and were lost in the loud animated hum which never ceased under the gay uproar of the music.

When they played the barcarole from Contes d’Hoffman everybody sang it and rose to their feet cheering the beautiful prima donna with whom the song was so closely identified, and who made one of a gay group at a flower-smothered table.

And she rose and laughingly acknowledged the plaudits; but they wouldn’t let her alone until she mounted her chair and sang it in solo for them; and then the vast salon went wild.

Neville, surveying the vicinity, recognised people he never dreamed would have appeared in such a place—­here a celebrated architect and his pretty wife entertaining a jolly party, there a well-known lawyer and somebody else’s pretty wife; and there were men well known at fashionable clubs and women known in fashionable sets, and men and women characteristic of quieter sets, plainly a little uncertain and surprised to find themselves there.  And he recognised assorted lights of the “profession,” masculine and feminine; and one or two beautiful meteors that were falling athwart the underworld, leaving fading trails of incandescence in their jewelled wake.

The noise began to stun him; he laughed and talked and sang with the others, distinguishing neither his own voice nor the replies.  For the tumult grew as the hour advanced toward midnight, gathering steadily in strength, in license, in abandon.

And now, as the minute hands on the big gilded clock twitched nearer and nearer to midnight, the racket became terrific, swelling, roaring into an infernal din as the raucous blast of horns increased in the streets outside and the whistles began to sound over the city from Westchester to the Bay, from Long Island to the Palisades.