For an instant, as comrades side by side upon a battle-field might do, they glanced over the scene. To the painter's eye, the assembled guests appeared as a glittering, shimmering, scintillating, cloud-like mass that, never still, stirred within itself, in slow, graceful restless motions--forming always, without purpose new combinations and groupings that were broken up, even as they were shaped, to be reformed; with the black spots and splashes of the men's conventional dress ever changing amid the brighter colors and textures of the women's gowns; the warm flesh tints of bare white arms and shoulders, gleaming here and there; and the flash and sparkle of jewels, threading the sheen of silks and the filmy softness of laces. Into the artist's mind--fresh from the tragic earnestness of his day's work, and still under the enduring spell of his weeks in the mountains--flashed a sentence from a good old book; "For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."
Then they were greeting, with conventional nothings their beautiful hostess; who, with a charming air of triumphant--but not too triumphant--proprietorship received them and passed them on, with a low spoken word to Aaron King; "I will take charge of you later."
Conrad Lagrange, before they drifted apart, found opportunity to growl in his companion's ear; "A near-great musician--an actress of divorce court fame--an art critic, boon companion of our friend Rutlidge--two free-lance yellow journalists--a poet--with leading culture-club women of various brands, and a mob of mere fashion and wealth. The pickings should be good. Look at 'Materialism', over there."
In a wheeled chair, attended by a servant in livery, a little apart from the center of the scene,--as though the pageant of life was about to move on without him,--but still, with desperate grip, holding his place in the picture, sat the genius of it all--the millionaire. The creature's wasted, skeleton-like limbs, were clothed grotesquely in conventional evening dress. His haggard, bestial face--repulsive with every mark of his wicked, licentious years--grinned with an insane determination to take the place that was his by right of his money bags; while his glazed and sunken eyes shone with fitful gleams, as he rallied the last of his vital forces, with a devilish defiance of the end that was so inevitably near.