But the gentler sex in these days of drugs and dancing are, it must be admitted, strangely abnormal. Women with crazes abound everywhere. That women are emancipated from the almost Oriental thraldom in which they lived in the days of Victoria the Good is a bright sign of our times--the times of discovery, refinement, and mutual happiness of all classes. But certain circles--those circles wherein women take drugs to enable them to dance the better, circles where opium is smoked, and where morals do not count, where religion is scoffed at and relegated to the limbo of an out-of-date fiction, and where only the possessor of money counts, there is a strange and mysterious phase of Society indescribable by the pen. Only those who know of them by personal experience--the experience of "fast living"--can understand it. And even the man-about-town stands aghast at the ultra-modern crazes. As we sat chatting in that quiet comfortable room, I confess that I became rather fascinated by my host. Perhaps he was a trifle too cynical at times, but his matrimonial trouble no doubt accounted for it. Suddenly he rose and stretched himself rather wearily, I thought. The thin, delicate hand which held his cigar was long and tapering, and upon his finger was an antique Florentine ring in the form of a small emerald moth. I particularly noticed it as of very unusual pattern. I recollected seeing one of the same design in the Louvre Museum in Paris several years before. "Ah!" he sighed. "I shall very soon leave London again--thank goodness! Next week I return to Fiesole for the winter. I am no great lover of London--are you, Mr.--Mr. Garfield?" "My business as an electrical engineer keeps me in London," was my reply. "Besides, I have recently sustained a very heavy financial loss. If, however, I were independent I should certainly live in the country. London has, to me, become unbearable since the war." "Ah! I quite agree," replied my host. "All our fine British traditions seem to have gone by the board. That, at least, is my own view. But there--perhaps I am getting an old fogey." "I don't think so," I replied. "Everyone who knows you, Mr. De Gex, is well aware of your up-to-dateness, and your great generosity." "Are they?" he asked, smiling wearily. "Personally I care very little. Popularity and prosperity can be manufactured by any shrewd press-agent employed at so much a year. Without publicity, the professional man or woman would never obtain a hearing. These are the days when incompetency properly boomed raises the incompetent to greatness--and even to Cabinet rank. Neither would the society woman ever obtain a friend without her boom," he went on. "Bah! I'm sick of it all!" he added with a sweep of his thin white hand. "But it is refreshing to talk with you, a stranger." He was certainly frank in his criticisms, and I was not at all surprised when he commenced to question me as to my profession, where I lived, and what were my future plans.