For an instant, as comrades side by side upon a battle-field might do,
they glanced over the scene. To the painter's eye, the assembled guests
appeared as a glittering, shimmering, scintillating, cloud-like mass that,
never still, stirred within itself, in slow, graceful restless
motions--forming always, without purpose new combinations and groupings
that were broken up, even as they were shaped, to be reformed; with the
black spots and splashes of the men's conventional dress ever changing
amid the brighter colors and textures of the women's gowns; the warm flesh
tints of bare white arms and shoulders, gleaming here and there; and the
flash and sparkle of jewels, threading the sheen of silks and the filmy
softness of laces. Into the artist's mind--fresh from the tragic
earnestness of his day's work, and still under the enduring spell of his
weeks in the mountains--flashed a sentence from a good old book; "For what
is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and
then vanisheth away."
Then they were greeting, with conventional nothings their beautiful
hostess; who, with a charming air of triumphant--but not too
triumphant--proprietorship received them and passed them on, with a low
spoken word to Aaron King; "I will take charge of you later.
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