It was a very beautiful affair, in the beginning.  There was a large private dining-room, elaborately decorated, with a string orchestra concealed in a bower of plants.  But there were cocktails even on the side-board at the doorway; and by the time the guests had got to the coffee, every one was hilariously drunk.  After each toast they would hurl their glasses over their shoulders.  The purpose of a “bachelor dinner,” it appeared, was a farewell to the old days and the boon companions; so there were sentimental and comic songs which had been composed for the occasion, and were received with whirlwinds of laughter.

By listening closely and reading between the lines, one might get quite a history of the young host’s adventurous career.  There was a house up on the West Side; and there was a yacht, with, orgies in every part of the world.  There was the summer night in Newport harbour, when some one had hit upon the dazzling scheme of freezing twenty-dollar gold pieces in tiny blocks of ice, to be dropped down the girls’ backs!  And there was a banquet in a studio in New York, when a huge pie had been brought on, from which a half-nude girl had emerged, with a flock of canary birds about her!  Then there was a damsel who had been wont to dance upon the tops of supper tables, clad in diaphanous costume; and who had got drunk after a theatre-party, and set out to smash up a Broadway restaurant.  There was a cousin from Chicago, a wild lad, who made a speciality of this diversion, and whose mistresses were bathed in champagne.—­Apparently there were numberless places in the city where such orgies were carried on continually; there were private clubs, and artists’ “studios”—­there were several allusions to a high tower, which Montague did not comprehend.  Many such matters, however, were explained to him by an elderly gentleman who sat on his right, and who seemed to stay sober, no matter how much he drank.  Incidentally he gravely advised Montague to meet one of the young host’s mistresses, who was a “stunning” girl, and was in the market.

Toward morning the festivities changed to a series of wrestling-bouts; the young men stripped off their clothing and tore the table to pieces, and piled it out of the way in a corner, smashing most of the crockery in the process.  Between the matches, champagne would be opened by knocking off the heads of the bottles; and this went on until four o’clock in the morning, when many of the guests were lying in heaps upon the floor.

Montague rode home in a cab with the elderly gentleman who had sat next to him; and on the way he asked if such affairs as this were common.  And his companion, who was a “steel man” from the West, replied by telling him of some which he had witnessed at home.  At Siegfried Harvey’s theatre-party Montague had seen a popular actress in a musical comedy, which was then the most successful play running in New York.  The house was sold out weeks ahead, and after the