So some air-dwelling German has told us, long time the world slumbered unconscious, wrapped in a dreamless sleep. And the gold of the Rhine still slumbered in its waters, and the gods kept guard. Then all things broke to consciousness, after a myriad of cycles of years; and their first awakening was a joy; and men arose, and lived in the light of the earth. But shortly, after some few centuries, this consciousness became a blight; and they turned, and knew themselves. And the gold was wrested from the deep waters by an evil race of men, forswearing love forever; and the love of the world turned to avarice, and the love of man to the love of self, and the love divine was forgotten and whelmed in the dusk of the gods. And so the pessimists of the day must follow out the old myth, and tell us that the end and cure of all is this darkness of the gods, the death of all things, the black waters that well again from earth, the rising waves of the dreamless sea. But behind Zeus and Prometheus and Hera lay Fate, a power not themselves, to whom both gods and men must bow. And beneath Wotan and Loge sits Erda, in the heart of Earth, silent; and the web of things to come is spun, slowly, by the silent Norns. CHAPTER XV. THE DIVERSIONS OF FINE LADIES. Paris had palled upon Mr. Caryl Wemyss, and in February he returned to New York. Paris, he found, had deteriorated since the Empire. Moreover, his social position there was not wholly satisfactory. In London it was better; but even there they did not sufficiently distinguish between him and other Americans; between him, son of the famous poet-dramatist, minister to England and man of letters, when there were no other American men of letters, and, for instance, the present minister, whom Wemyss did not consider a gentleman at all. So his friend, the young Earl of Birmingham, wishing to visit America, Wemyss had returned with him; and was now piloting that nobleman through the maze of New York society. But this proved a more difficult task than Wemyss anticipated; for the Earl was quite unable to recognize any distinctions, and evinced a most catholic taste for all beauty, unadorned by birth, and pretty faces without pedigree. And now the Farnums had presumed to give a ball in his honor; and Birmingham was there, and Wemyss, of course, had had to go there with him, and Flossie Gower had come to keep him company. A man may be a peer of England and wear a coronet; but a man’s a man for a’ that. And as the pudgy, little, sandy-haired Englishman, with his scrap of whisker, his red eyes and his white eyebrows, stood beside Miss Farnum, it was easy, at least for Wemyss and Flossie Gower, to see that he was much impressed.