I understood.  Eight years’ campaigning in New York, and London and Paris would teach even an idiot that nineteenth century ‘best society’ can lift you so close to the naughtiness of the golden Roman era, that one only has to strain a very little on tip-toe, to feel at one’s ease with the jeunesse doree of dead ages.  Here—­what do you find in a huge stone well sunk into the bowels of the earth?  About as enticing as a plunge into a dry cistern, suddenly unroofed?  If spectres we must hunt, do let them be festive, like those Faust danced with on the Brocken!”

“You should be ashamed, Alma!  Miss Gordon is the very soul of courteous toleration, or she would resent the teasing goad of your Philistinism,” cried the brother, Rivers Cutting, who in his new style yachting suit of blue cloth appeared veritably the jaunty genius of fashionable modernity, confronting the ghost of antiquity.

“You forget, Rivers, some of the sage dicta you brought back from the ‘Summer School of Philosophy’, when you followed your last Boston flame to Concord, where she went poaching on the sacred preserves of the ‘Illuminati,’ hunting a new sensation.  ’We must be as courteous to human beings as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.’  Now being Leo’s very sincere friend, and knowing that the supreme moment of her facial triumph is when, like a startled fawn, she opens her eyes wide in horrified amazement at some inconceivable heresy, do you suppose I am so recreant to loyalty as to fail in providing her occasionally with the necessary Gorgon, ethical or archaeolegical, as surroundings warrant?

“History was never the fetich of my girlhood, and that quartette of dry-as-dust worthies whom Leo carries around in leash, as other women carry pugs and poodles, came near giving me meningitis in my tender years.  My first governess, a Puritan spinster, full of zeal, and conscientiously bent on earning her wages, by exercising my brains to their utmost capacity, undertook to introduce me to all the highly immoral personages and practices that made the Punic Wars famous.  By way of making Imilco a lifelong acquaintance, she illustrated the siege of Agrigentum by a huge, hideous image of Phalaris’ ‘Brazen Bull,’ drawn with chalk on the school-room blackboard.

“A wonderful beast it certainly was; that taurus with head lowered, tail lashing the air, one hoof pawing savagely, worthy representative of all the horrors it typified, and which she explained with maddening perspicuity.  That night, when papa tore himself away from the club room at one o’clock, and met mamma on the doorstep—­just coming home from a supper at Delmonico’s after an opera party—­they were ascending the stairs, when frantic cries drove from her ears the echoes of ‘Traviata’s’ witching strain.  Thinking only a conflagration would justify the din, papa threw up the hall sash and shouted ‘fire!’ and the police sounded the alarm, and all pandemonium broke loose.  Investigation