urtain, closing his sunken eyes.

CHAPTER IX CONFESSIONS

In a city in transition, where yesterday is as dead as a dead century,
where those who prepare the old year for burial are already taking the
ante-mortem statement of the new, the future fulfils the functions
of the present. Time itself is considered merely as a by-product of
horse-power, discounted with flippancy as the unavoidable friction
clogging the fly-wheel of progress.

Memory, once a fine art, is becoming a lost art in Manhattan.

His world and his city had almost ceased to think of Siward.

For a few weeks men spoke of him in the several clubs of which he had
lately been a member--spoke of him always in the past tense; and after a
little while spoke of him no more.

In that section of the social system which he had inhabited, his absence
on account of his mother's death being taken for granted, people laid
him away in their minds almost as ceremoniously as they had laid away
the memory of his mother. Nothing halted because he was not present;
nothing was delayed, rearranged, or abandoned because his familiar
presence chanced to be missing. There remained only one more place to
fill at a cotillion, dinner, or bridge party; only another man for opera
box or week's end; one man the more to be counted on, one more man to
be counted out--transferred to the credit of profit and loss, and the
ledger closed for the season.

They who remembered him, among those who had not yet lost that
old-fashioned art, were very few--a young girl here and there, over
whom he had been absent-mindedly sentimental; a debutante or two who had
adored him from a distance as a friend of elder sister or brother; here
and there an old, old lady to whom he had been considerate, and who
perhaps remembered something of the winning charm of the Siwards when
the town was young--his father, perhaps, perhaps his grandfather--these
thought of him at intervals; the remainder had no leisure to remember
even if they had not forgotten how to do it. Several cabmen missed him
for a while; now and then a privileged cafe waiter inquired about him
from gay, noisy parties entering some old haunt of his. Mr. Desmond, of
art gallery and roulette notoriety, whose business is not to forget, was
politely regretful at his absence from certain occult ceremonies which
he had at irregular intervals graced with votive offerings. And the list
ended there--almost, not quite; for there were two people wh