The voice, a young man’s voice, struck out, as it were, from an indescribable medley of incongruous sound. The background was formed by the lightest and most melodious dance music, produced solely from stringed instruments; lutes and guitars seemed to predominate, and the result had a character and rhythm of its own which was essentially graceful, picturesque, and Italian; against the background, a high-pitched discord compounded of every imaginable key, there clashed a very Babel of tongues--the eminently unmusical voice of modern society, with all its faults of modulation and pronunciation, blended into a whole full of a character absolutely incompatible with the old-time southern harmonies with which it mingled. The speaker’s figure, as he stopped suddenly in a hurried passage across the room, stood out from a blaze of colour, light, and gorgeousness of every description, which fell without pause or cessation into ever fresh combination, as the beautifully dressed crowd moved to and fro in its magnificent setting. And the spectacle presented to the eye was as curiously jarring, as strikingly suggestive of the ludicrous inconsistencies of dreamland, as were the sounds that saluted the ear. There was hardly a man or woman to be seen whose dress was not as faithful a copy of the costume prevalent among the Florentine nobles under the magnificent rule of the Medici as time and money could make it. There was not a false note in the surroundings; money had been poured out like water in order that a perfect reproduction of an old Florentine palace might be achieved; and as far as art could go nothing was left to be desired. The fault lay with nature. The old Italians doubtless had their own mannerisms, possibly their own vulgarities, of carriage, gesture, and general demeanour; but theirs were not the mannerisms and vulgarities of modern “smart” society. The young man who had greeted Julian exemplified in his own person all the preposterous incongruity of the whole. His dress was a marvel of correctness to the minutest detail. Its wearer’s face was of the heavy, inanimate, bull-dog type; his movement as he shook hands with Julian was an exaggerated specimen of the approved affectation of the moment; his speech was clipped and drawled after the most approved model among “mashers.” He was the son of the house, and there was a kind of slow excitement about his manner, struggling with a nonchalant carelessness which he evidently wished to present to the world as his mental attitude of the moment. There was a note of excitement also in the medley of voices about him. The “affair” was “a huge go”--as the young man himself would have expressed it. And neither he nor any one of his father’s guests was troubled for one instant by any sense of the ludicrousness of the effect produced.