It was a great palace of pleasure, in which beautiful and graceful men and women played together in all sorts of beautiful and graceful ways.  In the evenings great logs blazed in the fireplace in the hall, and there might be an informal dance—­there was always music at hand.  Now and then there would be a stately ball, with rich gowns and flashing jewels, and the grounds ablaze with lights, and a full orchestra, and special trains from the city.  Or a whole theatrical company would be brought down to give an entertainment in the theatre; or a minstrel show, or a troupe of acrobats, or a menagerie of trained animals.  Or perhaps there would be a great pianist, or a palmist, or a trance medium.  Anyone at all would be welcome who could bring a new thrill—­it mattered nothing at all, though the price might be several hundred dollars a minute.

Montague shook hands with his host and hostess, and with a number of others; among them Billy Price who forthwith challenged him, and carried him off to the shooting-gallery.  Here he took a rifle, and proceeded to satisfy her as to his skill.  This brought him to the notice of Siegfried Harvey, who was a famous cross-country rider and “polo-man.”  Harvey’s father owned a score of copper-mines, and had named him after a race-horse; he was a big broad-shouldered fellow, a favourite of every one; and next morning, when he found that Montague sat a horse like one who was born to it, he invited him to come out to his place on Long Island, and see some of the fox-hunting.

Then, after he had dressed for dinner, Montague came downstairs, and found Betty Wyman, shining like Aurora in an orange-coloured cloud.  Sho introduced him to Mrs. Vivie Patton, who was tall and slender and fascinating, and had told her husband to go to hell.  Mrs. Vivie had black eyes that snapped and sparkled, and she was a geyser of animation in a perpetual condition of eruption.  Montague wondered if she would have talked with him so gaily had she known what he knew about her domestic entanglements.

The company moved into the dining-room, where there was served another of those elaborate and enormously expensive meals which he concluded he was fated to eat for the rest of his life.  Only, instead of Mrs. Billy Alden with her Scotch, there was Mrs. Vivie, who drank champagne in terrifying quantities; and afterward there was the inevitable grouping of the bridge fiends.

Among the guests there was a long-haired and wild-looking foreign personage, who was the “lion” of the evening, and sat with half a dozen admiring women about him.  Now he was escorted to the music-room, and revealed the fact that he was a violin virtuoso.  He played what was called “salon music”—­music written especially for ladies and gentlemen to listen to after dinner; and also a strange contrivance called a concerto, put together to enable the player to exhibit within a brief space the utmost possible variety of finger gymnastics.  To learn to perform these feats one had to devote his whole lifetime to practising them, just like any circus acrobat; and so his mind became atrophied, and a naive and elemental vanity was all that was left to him.