What a pantheon of rococo deities was this dining-room--princes and princesses, counts and discounts, countesses and marquises, Wall Street millionaires and millionheiresses, and average American wives and widows with friends and dining-men. What is a dining-man? He's a professional diner-out. He has only to look aristocratic and speak Italian--or English with a Fifth-Avenue accent--and be able to recognize the people worth while. A fat old English duchess with a staff in her hand and the royal purple in her hair made her way to her table with the walk of an apple-woman. There was no nonsense about her, no illusions, no clinging to a vanished youth. She was a real woman, and I could have kissed the hem of her garments for joy. A lady sat at one of the tables who suggested the chloride of nitrogen, being so fat and fetched in at the waist that her shoulders heaved at every breath, and one could not look at her without fearing that she would explode and fill the air with hooks and eyes and buttons. A large, swell-front, fully furnished Pennsylvania widow sat near us with her young daughter and a marquis and a well-earned reputation for great wealth. It seemed to be a busy, popular, agreeable reputation, with many acquaintances in the room. The widow's costume pleaded for observation and secured it, for she sat serene and prodigious in jeweled fat and satin, dripping pearls and emeralds and diamonds. There was a battlement of diamonds on her brow and a cinch of them on her neck, surrounded by a stone wall of pearls as big as the marbles that I used to play with as a boy. Hanging from her ears were two mammoth pearls, either of which in a sling might have slain Goliath. Her shoulders glowed with gems, and a stomacher of diamonds adorned her intemperate zone. What a fresco of American abundance she made in the remarkable decorations of that room. By and by she drew a wallet from her breast and paid her bill. “How wonderful!” our hostess exclaimed, suddenly. A princess in red slippers and with no stockings on her feet, as Mrs. Fraley informed me, strode in with her young man and took a table near us. She had been a Wisconsin girl, and her happy Fifth Avenue dialect rose like the spray of a fountain and fell lightly on our ears. “We had a sockless statesman in our country, but I never heard of a sockless princess before,” Mrs. Sampf sputtered. “They tell me that some of these aristocrats are very poor.” Mrs. Sampf had been to Egypt and the Holy Land, and talked freely of her travels. “Yes, we went up the Nile to see the dam,” she said. “It's a good dam, I guess, but I didn't care much for it. What I wanted to see was the life. The folks are awful dirty; I wanted to take a scrubbing-brush and some Pearline and go at 'em.” “A few American women with scrubbing-brushes would improve the Egyptian race,” I suggested. “How about the food?”