And here we may save space and the wearied reader’s attention, for they had no ethics and no æsthetics; and their philosophy of life was simple. Probably their sensual sin was not so great as Arthur’s--for terrapin and duck were a weariness to most of them--but in the _summum bonum_ they all agreed. To be not as others are, and have those others know it--such was their simple creed. Jimmy De Witt was on the whole the most innocent; his being yearned for horses and yachts, even if they were not all the fastest; and he was not a bad fellow, a great friend of Lucie Gower himself, and so sitting _in loco conjugis_, for the husband of the hostess was absent. To him came next Mrs. Malgam, who was--but all the world, yea, even to the uttermost bounds thereof where the society newspapers do permeate, knows all about Mrs. Malgam. Upon De Witt’s other side, convenient, Miss Duval--“Pussie” Duval, grand-daughter of Antoine of that ilk who had kept the little barber shop down on Chambers Street; then Arthur, on Mrs. Gower’s right; and on her left Caryl Wemyss again, a modern Boston Faust, son of the great poet who was afterwards minister to Austria; his son, thus born to the purple of diplomacy, had lived in Paris, London, and Vienna, executed plays, poems, criticisms, music, and painting, and, at thirty-five, had discovered the hollowness of things, having himself become perfect in all of them. So he became a critic of civilization--and this is how he was not as other men--for it was the era of the decadence, and he the Cassandra who foresaw it. Mrs. Gower, our leading lady, made the sixth. From being the lonely Cinderella of an unexplored fireside, Flossie had grown to be one of the most famed and accomplished hostesses in all New York. She had the tact of knowing what topics would touch the souls of the men and move the women’s hearts, and of leading the conversation up to these without apparent effort or insolent dictation. She could make Strephon talk to Chloe, or Marguerite to Faust, without taking the awkward pair by the elbows and knocking their heads together. And all this sweetly, simply, while reserving the preferred _rôle_ to herself, as a carver justly sets aside for his own use his favorite bit of venison. Ordinarily, these six people--four of them, surely--would have talked about other people and their possessions; but Mrs. Flossie rightly fancied that Arthur, knowing little of the world, could only talk about books, or at most, about the world in the abstract. Taking up the talk where it was left at the opera, an early speech from Arthur to the effect that he did not mean to go much into society gave her the necessary opening. “You must not do so,” said she. “Society is as important to a young man as work. Is it not, Mr. Wemyss?” (One of the charms of this woman’s cleverness was that indefinable quality of humor which consists in the relish of incongruities; her reference to Wemyss for the uses of work, for instance.)