And the tray was always full.  One wall of the dining-room farther on was laden with delicate novelties in the way of food.  A string quartette played for the dancers in the music-room.  There were a dozen corners in different rooms screened with banks of flowers and concealing divans.  The dancing and singing were superb, individual, often abandoned in character, as was the conversation.  As the morning wore on (for it did not begin until after midnight) the moods of all were either so mellowed or inflamed as to make intentions, hopes, dreams, the most secret and sybaritic, the order of expression.  One was permitted to see human nature stripped of much of its repression and daylight reserve or cant.  At about four in the morning came the engaged dancers, quite the piece de resistance—­with wreaths about heads, waists and arms for clothing and well, really nothing more beyond their beautiful figures—­scattering rose leaves or favors.  These dancers the company itself finally joined, single file at first, pellmell afterwards—­artists, writers, poets—­dancing from room to room in crude Bacchic imitation of their leaders—­the women too—­until all were singing, parading, swaying and dancing in and out of the dozen rooms.  And finally, liquor and food affecting them, I suppose, many fell flat, unable to do anything thereafter but lie upon divans or in corners until friends assisted them elsewhere—­to taxis finally.  But mine host, as I recall him, was always present, serene, sober, smiling, unaffected, bland and gracious and untiring in his attention.  He was there to keep order where otherwise there would have been none.

I mention this merely to indicate the character of a long series of such events which covered the years 19—­ to 19—.  During that time, for the reason that I have first given (his curious pleasure in my company), I was part and parcel of a dozen such more or less vivid affairs and pleasurings, which stamped on my mind not only X——­ but life itself, the possibilities and resources of luxury where taste and appetite are involved, the dreams of grandeur and happiness which float in some men’s minds and which work out to a wild fruition—­dreams so outre and so splendid that only the tyrant of an obedient empire, with all the resources of an enslaved and obedient people, could indulge with safety.  Thus once, I remember, that a dozen of us—­writers and artists—­being assembled in his studio in New York one Friday afternoon for the mere purpose of idling and drinking, he seeming to have nothing better to do for the time being, he suddenly suggested, and as though it had but now occurred to him, that we all adjourn to his country house on Long Island, which was not yet quite finished (or, rather, furnished), but which was in a sufficient state of completion to permit of appropriate entertainment providing the necessaries were carried out there with us.

As I came to think of this afterward, I decided that after all it was not perhaps so unpremeditated as it seemed and that unconsciously we served a very useful purpose.  There was work to do, suggestions to be obtained, an overseer, decorator and landscape gardener with whom consultations were absolutely necessary; and nothing that X——­ ever did was without its element of calculation.  Why not make a gala affair of a rather dreary November task—­