Also one sees shop-girls, dragged here by some chance admirer. They wear brownish cloaks, ornamented with knots--the kind that looks worn the day it is taken from the shop. And there are ladies of that species whom one calls "ladies" only between quotation marks. These wear gigantic picture hats trimmed with rhinestones. The hems of their dresses are torn and flecked with last season's mud. There are students who desire to be intoxicated through the lust of the eye; artists who desire to regain a lost sobriety of vision; journalists who find stuff for leader copy in the blue despatches that are posted here; Bohemians and loungers of every station, typical of every degree of sham dignity and equally sham depravity. They all intermingle in manicoloured waves. It is the mad masque of the metropolis.... A friend comes up to me, one of the three hundred bosom friends with whom I am wont to swap shady stories. He is pallid with sleeplessness, deep horizontal lines furrow his forehead, his brows are convulsively drawn. So we all look.... "Look here," he says, "you weren't at the Meyers' yesterday." "I was invited elsewhere." "Where?" I've got to think a minute before I can remember the name. We all suffer from weakness in the head. "Aha," he cries. "I'm told it was swell. Magnificent women ... and that fellow ... er ... thought reader and what's her name ... yes ... the Sembrich ... swell ... you must introduce me there some day...." Stretching his legs he sinks down at my side on the sofa. Silence. My bosom friend and I have exhausted the common stock of interests. He has lit a cigarette and is busy catching the white clouds which he blows from his nose with his mouth. This employment seems to satisfy his intellect wholly. I, for my part, stare at the ceiling. There the golden bodies of snakes wind themselves in mad arabesques through chains of roses. The pretentious luxury offends my eye. I look farther, past the candelabrum of crystal which reflects sharp rainbow tints over all, past the painted columns whose shafts end in lily leaves as some torturing spear does in flesh. My glance stops yonder on the wall where a series of fresco pictures has been painted. The forms of an age that was drunk with beauty look down on me in their victorious calm. They are steeped in the glow of a southern heaven. The rigid splendour of the marble walls is contrasted with the magnificent flow of long garments.