them was never wholly destroyed.  These young men were dissolute, but not coarse; bold, but not vulgar; they took their pleasure in a delicately wanton fashion that was infinitely more dangerous in its influence on the mind than would have been the gross mirth and broad jesting of a similar number of uneducated plebeians.  The rude licentiousness of an uncultivated boor has its safety-valve in disgust and satiety, . . but the soft, enervating sensualism of a trained and cultured epicurean aristocrat is a moral poison whose effects are so insidious as to be scarcely felt till all the native nobility of character has withered, and naught is left of a man but the shadow-wreck of his former self.

There was nothing repulsive in the half-ironical, half-mischievous merriment of these patrician revellers; their witticisms were brilliant and pointed, but never indelicate; and if their darker passions were roused, and ready to run riot, they showed as yet no sign of it.  They enjoyed—­yes! with that selfish animal enjoyment and love of personal indulgence which all men, old and young without exception, take such delight in—­unless indeed they be sworn and sorrowful anchorites, and even then you may be sure they are always regretting the easy license and libertinage of their bygone days of unbridled independence when they could foster their pet weaknesses, cherish their favorite vices, and laugh at all creeds and all morality as though Divine Justice were a mere empty name, and they themselves the super-essence of creation.  Ah, what a ridiculous spectacle is Man! the two-legged pigmy of limited brain, and still more limited sympathies, that, standing arrogantly on his little grave the earth, coolly criticises the Universe, settles law, and measures his puny stature against that awful Unknown Force, deeply hidden, but majestically existent, which for want of ampler designation we call god—­God, whom some of us will scarcely recognize, save with the mixture of doubt, levity, and general reluctance; God, whom we never obey unless obedience is enforced by calamity; God, whom we never truly love, because so many of us prefer to stake our chances of the future on the possibility of His non-existence!

Strangely enough, thoughts of this God, this despised and forgotten Creator, came wandering hazily over Theos’s mind at the present moment when, glancing round the splendid banquet-table, he studied the different faces of all assembled, and saw Self, Self, Self, indelibly impressed on every one of them.  Not a single countenance was there that did not openly betray the complacent hauteur and tranquil vanity of absolute Egotism, Sah-luma’s especially.  But then Sah-luma had something to be proud of—­his genius; it was natural that he should be satisfied with himself—­ he was a great man!  But was it well for even a great man to admire his own greatness?  This was a pertinent question, and somewhat difficult to answer.  A genius must