"
Conrad Lagrange, before they drifted apart, found opportunity to growl in
his companion's ear; "A near-great musician--an actress of divorce court
fame--an art critic, boon companion of our friend Rutlidge--two free-lance
yellow journalists--a poet--with leading culture-club women of various
brands, and a mob of mere fashion and wealth. The pickings should be
good. Look at 'Materialism', over there."
In a wheeled chair, attended by a servant in livery, a little apart from
the center of the scene,--as though the pageant of life was about to move
on without him,--but still, with desperate grip, holding his place in the
picture, sat the genius of it all--the millionaire. The creature's wasted,
skeleton-like limbs, were clothed grotesquely in conventional evening
dress. His haggard, bestial face--repulsive with every mark of his wicked,
licentious years--grinned with an insane determination to take the place
that was his by right of his money bags; while his glazed and sunken eyes
shone with fitful gleams, as he rallied the last of his vital forces, with
a devilish defiance of the end that was so inevitably near.
As Aaron King, in the splendid strength of his inheritance, went to pay
his respects to the master of the house, that poor product of our age was
seized by a paroxysm of coughing, that shook him--gasping and
choking--almost into unconsciousness.
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