Montague had never been able to get over his wonder at the social phenomenon known as Mrs. Devon.  He came and took his chances in the jostling throngs; and except that he got into casual conversation with one of the numerous detectives whom he took for a guest he came off fairly well.  But all the time that he was being passed about and introduced and danced with, he was looking about him and wondering.  The grand staircase and the hall and parlours had been turned into tropical gardens, with palms and trailing vines, and azaleas and roses, and great vases of scarlet poinsettia, with hundreds of lights glowing through them. (It was said that this ball had exhausted the flower supply of the country as far south as Atlanta.) And then in the reception room one came upon the little old lady, standing’ beneath a bower of orchids.  She was clad in a robe of royal purple trimmed with silver, and girdled about with an armour-plate of gems.  If one might credit the papers, the diamonds that were worn at one of these balls were valued at twenty million dollars.

The stranger was quite overwhelmed by all the splendour.  There was a cotillion danced by two hundred gorgeously clad women and their partners—­a scene so gay that one could only think of it as happening in a fairy legend, or some old romance of knighthood.  Four sets of favours were given during this function, and jewels and objects of art were showered forth as if from a magician’s wand.  Mrs. Devon herself soon disappeared, but the riot of music and merry-making went on until near morning, and during all this time the halls and rooms of the great mansion were so crowded that one could scarcely move about.

Then one went home, and realized that all this splendour, and the human effort which it represented, had been for nothing but a memory!  Nor would he get the full meaning of it if he failed to realize that it was simply one of thousands—­a pattern which every one there would strive to follow in some function of his own.  It was a signal bell, which told the world that the “season” was open.  It loosed the floodgates of extravagance, and the torrent of dissipation poured forth.  From then on there would be a continuous round of gaieties; one might have three banquets every single night—­for a dinner and two suppers was now the custom, at entertainments!  And filling the rest of one’s day were receptions and teas and musicales—­a person might take his choice among a score of opportunities, and never leave the circle he met at Mrs. Devon’s.  Nor was this counting the tens of thousands of aspirants and imitators all over the city; nor in a host of other cities, each with thousands of women who had nothing to do save to ape the ways of the Metropolis.  The mind could not realize the volume of this deluge of destruction—­it was a thing which stunned the senses, and thundered in one’s ears like Niagara.