“It’s well enough for you to laugh,” said he, “for you are safe in the amphitheater while I am in the ring with the bull.”

“Why, you great big goose, is anybody going to hurt you?”

“No; and that’s the trouble.  If somebody were to hurt me, I could relieve myself of embarrassment by taking up revenge.”

At the very eleventh hour of preparation he was not only reconciled to the affliction of a reception, but appeared rather to look with favor upon the affair.  And it was this peculiar reasoning that brought him round:  “I am here in place of another.  I am not known.  I am as a writer who hides behind a pen-name.”

The evening came with a rumble of carriages.  An invitation to a reception means, “Come and be pleased.  Frowns are to be left at home.”  The difference between one society gathering and another is the difference that exists between two white shoes—­one may be larger than the other.  Witherspoon was lordly, and in his smile a stranger might have seen a life of generosities.  And with what a welcoming dignity he took the hand that in its time had cut the throats of a thousand hogs.  Diamonds gleamed in the mellowed light, and there were smiles none the less radiant for having been carefully trained.  The evening was warm.  There was a wing-like movement of feathered fans.  Scented time was flying away.

The guests were gone, and Henry sat in his room.  He had thrown off the garments which convention had prescribed, and now, with his feet on a table, he sat smoking an old black pipe that he had lolled with on the mountains of Costa Rica.  The night which was now ending waved back for review.  Ellen, beautiful in an empire gown, golden yellow, brocaded satin.  “Why did you try to dodge this?” she had asked in a whisper.  “You are the most self-possessed man in the house.  Can’t you see how proud we all are of you?  I have never seen mother so happy.”

The perfume of praise was in the air.  “Oh, I think your brother is just charming,” a young woman had said to Ellen, and Henry had caught the words.

“He is like my mother’s people.”  Mrs. Witherspoon was talking to a woman whose hair had been grayed and who appeared to enjoy the distinction of being an invalid.  The Coltons and the Brooks contingent had smeared him with compliments.  There was a literary group, and the titles of a hundred books were mentioned; one writer was charming; another was horrid.  There was the group of household government, and the servant-girl question, which has never been found in repose, was tossed from one woman to another and caught as a bag of sweets.  In the library was a commercial and real-estate gathering, and the field of speculation was broken up, harrowed and seeded down.

The black-bearded muser put his pipe aside, and from this glowing scene his thoughts flew away into a dark night when he stood in Ulmata, knocking at the door of a deserted house.  He got up and stood at the window.  Sparrows twittered.  Threads of gray dawn streaked the black warp of night.