gotiations, and the kind of wire-pulling in which she was known to
excel, she had induced a dozen fashionable women to exhibit themselves in
a series of pictures which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the
distinguished portrait painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed upon to
organize.

Lily was in her element on such occasions. Under Morpeth's guidance her
vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than
dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal of
draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights and shadows.
Her dramatic instinct was roused by the choice of subjects, and the
gorgeous reproductions of historic dress stirred an imagination which
only visual impressions could reach. But keenest of all was the
exhilaration of displaying her own beauty under a new aspect: of showing
that her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all
emotions to fresh forms of grace.

Mrs. Fisher's measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised in a
dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry's hospitality. The
protesting minority were forgotten in the throng which abjured and came;
and the audience was almost as brilliant as the show.

Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered
inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a
man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned
that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the
like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible
to the part money plays in their production: all he asked was that the
very rich should live up to their calling as stage-managers, and not
spend their money in a dull way. This the Brys could certainly not be
charged with doing. Their recently built house, whatever it might lack as
a frame for domesticity, was almost as well-designed for the display of a
festal assemblage as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian
architects improvised to set off the hospitality of princes. The air of
improvisation was in fact strikingly present: so recent, so
rapidly-evoked was the whole MISE-EN-SCENE that one had to touch the
marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one's self in
one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted
against the wall.

Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself, from
an angle of the ball-r