The dining-room of the Nouveau Luxe was at its fullest, and, having contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that Bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the close-packed tables.  He had come half an hour before the time he had named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed amusement of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes.  During some forty years’ perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special titillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe:  the same sense of putting his hand on human nature’s passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation.

As he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising tide of arrival—­for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not—­he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal.  The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure:  a phantom “society,” with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice.  And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence.

With this thought in his mind he looked up to greet his guest.  The Comte Raymond de Chelles, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as he seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene:  “Il n’y a pas a dire, my dear Bowen, it’s charming and sympathetic and original—­we owe America a debt of gratitude for inventing it!”

Bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction:  they were the very words to complete his thought.

“My dear fellow, it’s really you and your kind who are responsible.  It’s the direct creation of feudalism, like all the great social upheavals!”

Raymond de Chelles stroked his handsome brown moustache.  “I should have said, on the contrary, that one enjoyed it for the contrast.  It’s such a refreshing change from our institutions—­which are, nevertheless, the necessary foundations of society.  But just as one may have an infinite admiration for one’s wife, and yet occasionally—­” he waved a light hand toward the spectacle.  “This, in the social order, is the diversion, the permitted diversion, that your original race has devised:  a kind of superior Bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored.”