The first news of Easter came over the cables. She made her début at a concert in Berlin under the powerful wing of Lilli Lehmann and achieved a remarkable success. Her brilliant beauty was a factor, but it was her voice, luscious as an August sunset and her emotional temperament that caused the furore. (A press-agent's fiction. There are no "furores" in concert rooms, or at the opera. A lot of noise-loving imbeciles stamp their feet and shout. The claque is always busy. Hysterical criticism does the rest.) Certain exalted personages in the royal-box condescended to express their approval of Fraülein Esther Brandès, who was at once offered huge sums to sign a contract for future European appearances. (These offers are always announced in cablegrams.) Easter must have been ubiquitous for in the foreign dispatches next day was a sensational account of a duel she fought with Mary Garden in the Bois at Paris with Johnstone Bennett--dear old sporting "Johnny" as referee. Sybil Sanderson and Augusta Holmès sat in a balcony and compared scandals. Mary, lithe, elastic, and younger than Easter, pinked her antagonist. The duellists clasped hands and the party, chiefly composed of Parisian newspaper men, adjourned to Pré au Catalan there to drink fresh milk and stale gossip. Rumour had it that the two girls were in love with the same man, no less than the fascinating barytone at the Opera, Maurice Renaud. When Allie Wentworth, who was Easter's second, read this in "Le Soir" she burst into laughter and showed the story to "Johnny", who only lighted a fresh cigarette repeating the classic, "cinq lettres, le mot de Cambronne." THE FIFTH GATE _At the fifth gate, the warder stripped her; he took off the girdle that encompasses her waist_.... I Alfred Stone as he stood on the boardwalk opposite the Marlborough-Blenheim asked himself why some bold thinker had not elucidated the psychology of Atlantic City. It has no moral landscape, he told himself, though it boasts the finest of seascapes. If there had been invented, as there will be some day, a psychic cinematograph, then, perhaps, a complete picture might be presented of this vulgar and fascinating resort--for vulgar in the sense of popularity it unquestionably is; monumentally vulgar, epically vulgar--epical, that is the precise word. There is a sweep of colour, a breeziness of space, a riot of sound and a chaos of movement that appal because of their amplitude. All creation seems out-of-doors. You jostle elbows with the man from Hindustan, the man from Newark, the man from London, and the man from California. Black, white, red, yellow, brown and nondescript races mingle on the boardwalk in that never-ending promenade from the Inlet to Chelsea. Between the Pickle and the Million Dollar Piers the course of humanity takes its way. In that section it is thickest. At every other step you use the short-arm jolt. In ten minutes you long for the comparative ease of the rush-hour at Brooklyn Bridge.