beyond Rahway."

They ascended the steps of a dingy-fronted brick house in Clinton Place,
a little out of the Broadway rush. Passing through a bare, echoing hall,
they entered one of the two dining rooms of the club, connected by
immense sliding doors, now thrown open. They were broad, lofty rooms
with stained floors, mantels of gray marble, and rich old doors of
polished mahogany framed in white casements--the drawing rooms of some
staid family of a bygone generation, before the trade army had invaded
this once quiet neighborhood.

Ewing at once noticed the walls. They had been covered with a
grayish-brown cartridge paper, and on this the members of the Monastery
had plied their charcoal in fancies more or less attuned to the spirit
of the organization. There were monks in most of the pictures, monks
combating or, alas! overborne by one or another of that meretricious
trinity which ever conspires against godly living. Over the mantel in
the first room a pink-fleshed nymph in simple garb of chef's cap allured
an all but yielding St. Anthony with one of the club's dinner _menus_
held before his hunger-lit eyes. On a panel to the right of this a
befuddled lay brother, having emptied a flagon of wine, perched on the
arm of a chair and angled fatuously in a jar of mocking goldfish, to the
refrain:

"For to-morrow will be Friday, and
We've caught no fish to-day!"

To the left, Brother Hilarius furtively ignored his breviary as he
passed a gay _affiche_, from which a silken-limbed dancer beguiled him
with nimble, worldly caperings, and smiles of the flesh and the devil.

"There's a vacant panel or two in the other room," said Piersoll. "We'll
save one for you. Come down to the grill room--it's early yet."

They went out through the hall and down a narrow stairway. They heard
the lively hum of voices, and Ewing found himself in a low, wainscoted
room, finished in dull gray, where a dozen or so men talked loungingly
in corners, awaiting the dinner hour.

Piersoll presented him to several of these in so quick a succession that
their names became a many-syllabled murmur in his ears. They found seats
on a red-cushioned corner bench of churchly pattern, and Piersoll
ordered cocktails.

Ewing tried to follow the talk running about him. A boyish-looking
reporter for a morning paper was telling at a nearby table how he had
been the first to reach the scene of a railroad wreck in Pennsylvania
late the night before