fashion, then people go for the sensual music. Sex and music, a rotten mixture." He faded into the next room, where the band was playing, vertigionously. "I'll bet that he will live to write Istar's obituary. Alfred must be fifty, but he's a wiry old rum-hound," remarked some one. "He's a parasite on Istar. He does all her dirty jobs. She hates him as much as he hates her. They hate each other so much that I wonder they aren't man and wife." It was the much-married Bell who spoke. His companions assented. As for poor forgotten Ulick--Oh! well, any young man of twenty can be brilliant. The test comes when you are sixty. It must have been a queer crowd--that sextet! Their reactions--or should I say, their vaso-motor reflexes?--weren't precisely admirable. Dainty Dora, fair, fat, forty, was the squarest of the lot. She played the game. Now she's a fashionable modiste--a Madame. All her customers are men. But Istar? Ah! Istar panned out first-class. She may be a painted veil, as Ulick said, but the paint is beautiful, and the veil doesn't hide her good looks. To Istar! was the toast. And they drank the health of the greatest Isolde since Lilli Lehmann. Esther Brandès, the unvanquished. Istar, the Great Singing Whore of Modern Babylon. THE SEVENTH GATE _At the seventh gate, the warden stripped her; he took off the last veil that covers her body_.... I And because Istar had abhorred the Seven Deadly Virtues, and renounced them at the Last Gate in favour of the Seven Deadly Arts, the Warden of Life Eternal bestowed upon her the immeasurable boon of the Seven Capital Sins, which are: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth.... Added to these are the Eighth Deadly Sin, which is Perfume; the Sin Against the Holy Ghost; the sweet sin of Sappho; and the Supreme Sin, which is the denial of the Devil.... And Istar, Daughter of Sin, was happy and her days were long in the land, and she passed away in the odor of sanctity.... Blessed are the pure of heart; for they shall see God...! (_Alfred Stone's epitaph for Easter_) II Thus lived and died Ulick Invern in the companionship of his most intimate mentors throughout the tragi-comedy of his existence. Two books had imaged his reverse aspirations: Petronius, his thirst for an Absolute in evil; Thomas à Kempis, his God-intoxicated craving for the Infinite. Euthanasia came to him wearing an ambiguous smile. Yet, who shall dare say that he had lived in vain? On the vast uncharted lamp of mysticism extremes may meet, even mingle.... _Credo quia impossibile est_.... FINIS _New York_ _July 9--August 25, 1919_ End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Painted Veils, by James Huneker