“It is the literature of the decadence, of course,” said Wemyss; “an emasculated type, product of short-haired women and long-haired men, gynanders and androgynes. I have often myself thought of writing another novel--if only for the sake of putting a great, horrid man into it. But gentlemen should all the more have courage to reassert their essence. It is an age, after all, when one may lead a full life. There is a fine passage somewhere in Zola, where the lips of two lovers are unsealed at the approach of death. So we, on the eve of the destruction of society, are free to live our lives elementally; enforced to idleness, like patricians in the fall of Rome.” “Mr. Wemyss, do you know my definition of a Boston man?” cried Sewall, who had had an evident struggle to repress himself during this speech. “No,” said Wemyss, respectfully sipping a glass of Yquem. “An Essay at Life,” said Sewall, hurling the words at Wemyss like a missile. There was a certain pause and then Derwent was heard softly quoting Dante’s “gran rifiuto.” “So there is nothing for us, you both think, but to make ‘the grand refusal,’” said he, sadly. “To take no office in our human life, but wait for death; amusing ourselves as best we may.” After which, Lord Birmingham was heard saying to Miss Farnum, “I should so like to show you Noakes Park.” “No,” said Sewall, taking up the thread of the conversation again, “what’s the use of breaking lances on wind-mills? The simple fact is, that everybody wants about a hundred times his individual proportion of the world’s labor; and some few fellows have got to have it, and the other ninety-nine be deprived of that little which they have. Therefore the more toys we give the rabble to play with the better. When they find them out, they’ll break the toys and our heads with them.” “I’m sure,” said Mrs. Malgam, “I don’t see what there is so very terrible. I like real lace shawls; but my Irish servants prefer red and green ones. And what would be the use of taking a scrub-woman to the opera? She wouldn’t understand it.” “It’s astonishing how soon those same scrub-women catch on,” said Charlie Townley, who sat next. “I see two or three at the opera every night.” Derwent muttered something about the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; and Mrs. Gower said there was one in the box next her. “She has red arms and diamonds as big as a hotel-clerk’s,” said she, with a fine scorn. “But of course there must always be such people trying to get in.” “Kehew entered her; but she was scratched for the Derby,” said Van Kull to Si Starbuck, who was on the other side of Mrs. Wilton Hay. “De Mora told me she was safe for the Grand Prix.” “Kehew? why, that’s the very man who has entered his wife, too--at the opera,” laughed Flossie. “He’s a great friend of the Duc de Mora,” said Si Starbuck to his sister. “I don’t see what there is bad about the old woman, and the daughter’s capital fun.”