All of this was the unconscious expression of herself. Eros intellectualized! It can be done. Her achievement became known in a cultish way. She made admission to her circle more and more difficult and the harder it was the more anxious people were to get in. On Mrs. Valentine’s world she turned the tables. She flouted society and it began to knock at her door. She had something it wanted and sold it dear. There are always those who seek in art that which they have lost or used up or never dared take in life. There are those whose desires are projected upon the mind and obsess it long after the capacity for direct experience is ruined. There are those to whom anything esoteric and new is irresistible. There were those, besides, who sought Vera, notably among them a tall blond animal of the golden series. He was the man I saw bring Vera home that evening I waited to have it out with her. I met him again in London on Galt’s business while soliciting proxies among our foreign stockholders. At that time he was acting for his father’s estate with an English syndicate that had large investments in American railroads. Since then, by the will of Providence, he had come into possession of the estate together with an hereditary title of great social distinction. Enter, as he pleases, Lord Porteous. With a thin, cynical head, a definite simplicity of outline and an exaggerated, voluptuous grace of body, he remarkably resembled an old Greek drawing. How he had found Vera in the first place I never knew. That happened, at any rate, before she was rich. He had the trained British instinct for putting money with the right people, and it was true that the English discovered Galt from afar while he was yet almost unknown in Wall Street. But when I saw him that first time with Vera the Great Midwestern was on its way to bankruptcy and Galt’s interest in it was extremely precarious. Well, no matter. It was inevitable however it happened. When he returned to this country as Lord Porteous he found her again and immediately added his prestige to her circle. Art bored him. He played the part of beguiled Philistine and amused himself by uttering bourgeoise comments of the most astonishing banality. Whether he truly meant them or not nobody knew for sure. He never by any chance betrayed his form. If satire, it was art; if not, it was incredible. Sensitive victims were reduced to a state of grinning horror. One who committed suicide was believed to have been driven to it by something Lord Porteous said to him in a moment of their being accidentally alone at the sideboard. The artist dropped his glass in a gibbering rage and went headlong forth. He was never seen alive again, and as m’lord couldn’t be asked we never knew what it was.