And then the Major paused again in his attack upon the soup.  “My dear Mrs. Winnie,” he said, “I can live for much more than one day upon sixteen hundred dollars!”

The Major was a famous club-man and bon vivant, as Montague learned later on.  “He’s an uncle of Mrs. Bobbie Waiting’s,” said Mrs. Alden, in his ear.  “And incidentally they hate each other like poison.”

“That is so that I won’t repeat my luckless question again?” asked Montague, with a smile.

“Oh, they meet,” said the other.  “You wouldn’t be supposed to know that.  Won’t you have any Scotch?”

Montague’s thoughts were so much taken up with the people at this repast that he gave little thought to the food.  He noticed with surprise that they had real spring lamb—­it being the middle of November.  But he could not know that the six-weeks-old creatures from which it had come had been raised in cotton-wool and fed on milk with a spoon—­and had cost a dollar and a half a pound.  A little later, however, there was placed before him a delicately browned sweetbread upon a platter of gold, and then suddenly he began to pay attention.  Mrs. Winnie had a coat of arms; he had noticed it upon her auto, and again upon the groat bronze gates of the Snow Palace, and again upon the liveries of her footmen, and yet again upon the decanter of Scotch.  And now—­incredible and appalling—­he observed it branded upon the delicately browned sweetbread!

After that, who would not have watched?  There were large dishes of rare fruits upon the table—­fruits which had been packed in cotton wool and shipped in cold storage from every corner of the earth.  There were peaches which had come from South Africa (they had cost ten dollars apiece).  There were bunches of Hamburg grapes, dark purple and bursting fat, which had been grown in a hot-house, wrapped in paper bags.  There were nectarines and plums, and pomegranates and persimmons from Japan, and later on, little dishes of plump strawberries-raised in pots.  There were quail which had come from Egypt, and a wonderful thing called “crab-flake a la Dewey,” cooked in a chafing-dish, and served with mushrooms that had been grown in the tunnels of abandoned mines in Michigan.  There was lettuce raised by electric light, and lima beans that had come from Porto Eico, and artichokes brought from France at a cost of one dollar each.—­And all these extraordinary viands were washed down by eight or nine varieties of wines, from the cellar of a man who had made collecting them a fad for the last thirty years, who had a vineyard in France for the growing of his own champagne, and kept twenty thousand quarts of claret in storage all the time—­and procured his Rhine wine from the cellar of the German Emperor, at a cost of twenty-five dollars a quart!

There were twelve people at dinner, and afterward they made two tables for bridge, leaving Charlie Carter to talk to Alice, and Mrs. Winnie to devote herself to Montague, according to her promise.  “Everybody likes to see my house,” she said.  “Would you?” And she led the way from the dining-room into the great conservatory, which formed a central court extending to the roof of the building.  She pressed a button, and a soft radiance streamed down from above, in the midst of which Mrs. Winnie stood, with her shimmering jewels a very goddess of the fire.