There were six: Sassoon, slight, waxen, bored, with a wandering, fatigued glance, oriental in the length of his head and the deep setting of the eyes; the Comte de Joncy, short, round-bellied, hair transparent and polished, parted from the forehead to the neck, with nothing of dignity except in his gesture and the agreeable modulation of his voice; Judge Massingale of the magistrates court, urbane, slightly stooped in shoulders, high in forehead, set in glance, an onlooker keenly observant, and observing with a relish that showed in the tolerant humor of the thin ever-smiling lips; Tom Busby, leader of cotillions and social prescriber to a bored and desperate world, active as a young girl, bald at thirty, but with a radiating charm, disliking no one, never failing in zest, animating the surface of gaiety, blind to ugliness below, well born and indispensable; Garret Lindaberry, known better as "Garry" Lindaberry, not yet thirty, framed like a frontiersman, with a head molded for a statesman, endowed with every mental energy except necessity, burning up his superb vitality in insignificant supremacies, a magnificent man-of-war sailing without a rudder, supremely elegant; never, in the wildest orgies, relaxing the control of absolute courtesy; finally, Harrigan Blood, interloper, last to arrive, abrupt and on the rush, in gray cheviot, which he had assumed as a flaunting of his independence before those whose motive for inviting him he perfectly understood. Neck and shoulders massive, head capacious and already beginning to show the stealing in of the gray, jaw strong and undershot like a bulldog's, cropped mustache, forehead seamed with wrinkles, incapable of silence or attention except when in the sudden contemplative pursuit of an idea, disdaining men, and women more than men on account of the distraction they flung him into, passionately devoted to ideas, he bided his time, knowing no morality but achievement. The group formed an interesting commentary on American society of the day, which parallels that of modern France, with its Bourbon, its Napoleonic and its Orleanist strata of nobility. Sassoon and Massingale were of the old legitimists, offshoots of families that had never relaxed their supremacy from colonial days; Lindaberry and Busby were inheritors in the third generation of that first period of industrial adventure, the period of the gold-fields of 1845, while Harrigan Blood was of the present era of volcanic opportunity, that creates in a day its marshals of the Grand Army of Industry, ennobles its soldiers of yesterday, and forces the portals of established sets with the golden knocking of new giants, who cast on the steps the soiled garments of the factory, the mining camp and the construction gang.