During the last year he had been vaguely aware of some occult hostility to himself and his enterprises—­not the normal hostility of business aggression—­but something indefinable—­merely negative at first, then more disturbing, sinister, foreboding; something in the very air to which he was growing more sensitive every day.

By all laws of finance, by all signs and omens, a serious reaction from the saturnalia of the last few years was already over-due.  He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail.  They still refused.  Perhaps they could not.  One thing was certain:  he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef on his own account.  He was beginning to realise that the men with whom rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either would not or could not aid him in shortening sail.

For a month, now, under his bland and graceful learning among the intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to pieces.  At such moments as this it showed on the surface.  It showed now in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the stare of the quenched eyes.

He was going to pieces, and he was aware of it.  For one thing, he recognised the physical change setting in; for another, his cool, selfish, self-centred equanimity was being broken down; the rigorous bodily regime from which he had never heretofore swerved and which alone enabled him to perform the exacting social duties expected of him, he had recently neglected.  He felt the impending bodily demoralisation, the threatened mental disintegration; he suspected its symptoms in a new nervous irritability, in lapses of self-command, in unaccountable excesses utterly foreign to his habitual self-control.

Dissolute heretofore only in the negative form, whatever it was that impended threatening him, seemed also to be driving him into an utter and monstrous lack of caution, and—­God alone knew how—­he had at last done the one thing that he never dreamed of doing.  And the knowledge of it, and the fear of it, bit deeper into his shallow soul every hour of the day and night.  And over all, vague, indefinite, hung something that menaced all that he cared for most on earth, held most sacred—­his social position in the Borough of Manhattan and his father’s pride in him and it.

* * * * *

After a while he stood up in his pale blue silken costume of that mincing, smirking century which valued a straight back and a well-turned leg, and very slowly, as though tired, he walked to the door separating his wife’s dressing-room from his own.

“May I come in?” he asked.

A maid opened the door, saying that Mrs. Dysart had gone to Miss Quest’s room to have her hair powdered.  He seated himself; the maid retired.

For a while he sat there, absently playing with his gilt-hilted sword, sombre-eyed, preoccupied, listening to the distant joyous tumult in the house, until quick, light steps and a breezy flurry of satin at the door announced his wife’s return.