al writer, although youth rose to eminence less
rapidly then than now. Dramatic critic of his newspaper for three
years (two years at the war), an envied, quoted and omniscient
columnist since his return from France. Journalistically he could rise
no higher, and none of the frequent distinguished parties given by the
Sophisticates was complete without the long lounging body and saturnine
countenance of Mr. Lee Clavering. As soon as he had set foot upon the
ladder of prominence Mr. Clavering had realized the value of
dramatizing himself, and although he was as active of body as of mind
and of an amiable and genial disposition, as his friends sometimes
angrily protested, his world, that world of increasing importance in
New York, knew him as a cynical, morose, mysterious creature, who, at a
party, transferred himself from one woman's side to another's by sheer
effort of will spurred by boredom. The unmarried women had given him
up as a confirmed bachelor, but a few still followed his dark face with
longing eyes. (He sometimes wondered what role he would have adopted
if he had been a blond.) As a matter of fact, he was intensely
romantic, even after ten years of newspaper work in New York and two of
war; and when his steel-blue half-closed eyes roved over a gathering at
the moment of entrance it was with the evergreen hope of discovering
the consummate woman.

There was no affectation in his idealistic fastidiousness. Nor, of
late, in his general boredom. Not that he did not still like his work,
or possibly pontificating every morning over his famous name to an
admiring public, but he was tired of "the crowd," the same old faces,
tired of the steady grind, of bad plays--he, who had such a passionate
love of the drama--somewhat tired of himself. He would have liked to
tramp the world for a year. But although he had money enough saved he
dared not drop out of New York. One was forgotten overnight, and
fashions, especially since the war, changed so quickly and yet so
subtly that he might be another year readjusting himself on his return.
Or find himself supplanted by some man younger than himself whose
cursed audacity and dramatized youthfulness would have accustomed the
facile public to some new brand of pap flavored with red pepper. The
world was marching to the tune of youth, damn it (Mr. Clavering was
beginning to feel elderly at thirty-four), but it was hard to shake out
the entrenched. He had his public hyp