“No, no.  Permit me to do a good deed without having to bear the infernal consequences in this life, at all events.  The chatter of those people is like the diabolical screaming of the peacock on the terrace of the Emir’s chief wife, made memorable by Thackeray the prophet.”  He paused a moment, and stroked his snowy pointed beard.  “Forgive my strong language,” he added; “really, they are grand adjectives those, ‘diabolical’ and ‘infernal.’  They call up the whole of Dante to my mind.”  Margaret laughed.

“Are you fond of Dante?” asked she.

“Very.  I sometimes buy a cheap copy and substitute the names of my pet enemies all through the Inferno wherever they will suit the foot.  In that way I get all the satisfaction the author got by putting his friends in hell, without the labour of writing, or the ability to compose, the poem.”  The Countess laughed again.

“Do you ever do the same thing with the Paradiso?”

“No,” answered Uncle Horace, with a smile.  “Purgatory belonged to an age when people were capable of being made better by suffering, and as for paradise, my heaven admits none but the fair sex.  They are all beautiful, and many of them are young.”

“Will you admit me, Mr. Bellingham?”

“St. Margaret has forestalled me,” said he gallantly, “for she has a paradise of her own, it seems, to which she has admitted me.”

And so they passed the evening pleasantly until the hour warned them that it was time to go to the great Van Sueindell house.  That mansion, like all private houses in America, and the majority of modern dwellings in other parts of the world, is built in that depraved style of architecture which makes this age pre-eminent in the ugliness of brick and stone.  There is no possibility of criticism for such monstrosity, as there also seems to be no immediate prospect of reform.  Time, the iron-fisted Nihilist, will knock them all down some day and bid mankind begin anew.  Meanwhile let us ignore what we cannot improve.  Night, the all-merciful, sometimes hides these excrescences from our sight, and sometimes the moon, Nature’s bravest liar, paints and moulds them into a fugitive harmony.  But in the broad day let us fix our eyes modestly on the pavement beneath us, or turn them boldly to the sky, for if we look to the right or the left we must see that which sickens the sense of sight.

On the present occasion, however, nothing was to be seen of the house, for the long striped canvas tent, stretching from the door to the carriage, and lined with plants and servants, hid everything else from view.  There is probably no city in the world where the business of “entertaining” is so thoroughly done as in New York.  There are many places where it is more agreeable to be “entertained;” many where it is done on a larger scale, for there is nothing in America so imposing as the receptions at Embassies and other great houses in England and