“Nobody expects a poet to have clothes,” laughed Miss Lewis. “Come in the garments of your fancy. And besides, Barry’s a true Bohemian.” Barry Creston, the giver of this party, was one of the sons of “Dan” Creston, the mine-owner and “railroad-king”, who a short while before had been elected senator from a Western state under circumstances of great scandal. “The old man’s a hard character, I guess,” said Miss Lewis; “but you must not believe all you read in the papers about Barry.” “I never read anything about him,” said the other; and so Miss Lewis went on to explain that Griswold, the Wall Street plunger, had got a divorce from his wife after throwing her into Barry’s arms; and that Barry’s sister had married an Austrian arch-duke who had maltreated her, and that Barry had kicked him out of a hotel-window in Paris. This invitation was a cause of much discomfort to Thyrsis. He had not come to the point where he was even curious about the life of the Barry Crestons of the world; and yet he did not like to hurt Miss Lewis’ feelings. She made it evident to him that she was determined to exhibit her “lion”; and so he said “all right.” The supper party was at the _Café_ _de_ _Bohême_, which was an Aladdin’s palace buried underground beneath a building in the “Tenderloin”. Fountains splashed in marble basins, and birds sang amid the branches of tropical flowering trees, while on a little stage a man in the costume and character of a Paris _apache_ sang a song of ferocious cynicism. And after him came a Japanese juggler of prodigious swiftness, and then a fat German woman in peasant guise who sang folk-songs, and wound up with “O, du lieber Augustin!” After which the company joined in the chorus of “Funiculi, funicula” and “Gaudeamus igitur”--for the patrons of the “Boheme” were nothing if they were not cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan also was the company at Barry Creston’s table. On one side of Thyrsis was Miss Lewis, and on the other was Mlle. Armand, the dancer who had set New York in a furore. Opposite to her was Scarpi, the famous baritone; and then there was Massey, a sculptor from Paris, and Miss Rita Seton, of the “Red Hussars” Company, and a Miss Raymond, a gorgeous creature with a red flamingo feather in her hat, who had been Massey’s model for his sensational figure of “Aurora”.