I could not stay in the house.  I went out into the streets, the streets brilliant in the sun of an autumn day, into the town, gay, bustling, crowded, pulsing with vigorous life.  How blue the sky was!  The sparrows twittered in Madison Square, the idlers sat in the sun, the children chased their hoops about the fountain.

I wandered into the club.  The news had preceded me there.  More than one member in the reading-room grasped my hand, with just a word of sympathy.  Two young fellows, whom I had last seen at the Henderson dinner, were seated at a small table.

“It’s rough, Jack”—­the speaker paused, with a match in his hand—­“it’s rough.  I’ll be if she was not the finest woman I ever knew.”

My wife and I were sitting in the orchestra stalls of the Metropolitan.  The opera was Siegfried.  At the close of the first act, as we turned to the house, we saw Carmen enter a box, radiant, in white.  Henderson followed, and took a seat a little in shadow behind her.  There were others in the box.  There was a little movement and flutter as they came in and glasses were turned that way.

“Married, and it is only two years,” I said.

“It is only a year and eight months,” my wife replied.

And the world goes on as cheerfully and prosperously as ever.

THE GOLDEN HOUSE

By Charles Dudley Warner

I

It was near midnight:  The company gathered in a famous city studio were under the impression, diligently diffused in the world, that the end of the century is a time of license if not of decadence.  The situation had its own piquancy, partly in the surprise of some of those assembled at finding themselves in bohemia, partly in a flutter of expectation of seeing something on the border-line of propriety.  The hour, the place, the anticipation of the lifting of the veil from an Oriental and ancient art, gave them a titillating feeling of adventure, of a moral hazard bravely incurred in the duty of knowing life, penetrating to its core.  Opportunity for this sort of fruitful experience being rare outside the metropolis, students of good and evil had made the pilgrimage to this midnight occasion from less-favored cities.  Recondite scholars in the physical beauty of the Greeks, from Boston, were there; fair women from Washington, whose charms make the reputation of many a newspaper correspondent; spirited stars of official and diplomatic life, who have moments of longing to shine in some more languorous material paradise, had made a hasty flitting to be present at the ceremony, sustained by a slight feeling of bravado in making this exceptional descent.  But the favored hundred spectators were mainly from the city-groups of late diners, who fluttered in under that pleasurable glow which the red Jacqueminot always gets from contiguity with the pale yellow Clicquot; theatre parties, a little jaded, and quite ready for something real and stimulating; men from the clubs and men from studios—­representatives of society and of art graciously mingled, since it is discovered that it is easier to make art fashionable than to make fashion artistic.