Mrs. Wentworth protested.

“Why, she has all sorts of people at her house—!”

“Except the unsuccessful.  Even planets have a little eccentricity of orbit.”

An hour or two later Keith found himself in such a scene of radiance as he had never witnessed before in all his life.  Though, as Norman had said, it was not one of the great balls, to be present at it was in some sort a proof of one’s social position and possibly of one’s pecuniary condition.

Keith was conscious of that same feeling of novelty and exhilaration that had come over him when he first arrived in the city.  It came upon him when he first stepped from the cool outer air into the warm atmosphere of the brilliantly lighted building and stood among the young men, all perfectly dressed and appointed, and almost as similar as the checks they were receiving from the busy servants in the cloak-room.  The feeling grew stronger as he mounted the wide marble stairway to the broad landing, which was a bower of palms and flowers, with handsome women passing in and out like birds in gorgeous plumage, and gay voices sounding in his ears.  It swept over him like a flood when he entered the spacious ball-room and gazed upon the dazzling scene before him.

“This is Aladdin’s palace,” he declared as he stood looking across the large ball-room.  “The Arabian Nights have surely come again.”

Mrs. Wentworth, immediately after presenting Keith to one or two ladies who were receiving, had been met and borne off by Ferdy Wickersham, and was in the throng at the far end of the great apartment, and some one had stopped Norman on the stairway.  So Keith was left for a moment standing alone just inside the door.  He had a sense of being charmed.  Later, he tried to account for it.  Was it the sight before him?  Even such perfect harmony of color could hardly have done it.  It must be the dazzling radiance of youth that almost made his eyes ache with its beauty.  Perhaps, it was the strain of the band hidden in the gallery among those palms.  The waltz music that floated down always set him swinging back in the land of memory.  He stood for a moment quite entranced.  Then he was suddenly conscious of being lonely.  In all the throng before him he could not see one soul that he knew.  His friends were far away.

Suddenly the wheezy strains of the fiddles and the blare of the horns in the big dining-room of the old Windsor back in the mountains sounded in his ears, and the motley but gay and joyous throng that tramped and capered and swung over the rough boards, setting the floor to swinging and the room to swaying, swam in a dim mist before his eyes.  Girls in ribbons so gay that they almost made the eyes ache, faces flushed with the excitement and joy of the dance; smiling faces, snowy teeth, dishevelled hair, tarlatan dresses, green and pink and white; ringing laughter and whoops of real merriment—­all passed before his senses.