them, having changed their names and soared in a world little dreamed of by their parents.  Also a perjury charge was made against the sister which effectually prevented her from controlling his estate, a lease long enough to give the financiers time for their work.  Naturally there was a great hue and cry over her, the scandal, the shame, that they should thus publicly refuse to recognize their parents as they did or had when confronted by them.  Horrible!  There were most heavily illustrated and tearful Sunday articles, all blazoned forth with pictures of his house and studio, his banks, cars, yacht, groups of guests, while the motives of those who produced the parents were overlooked.  The pictures of the parents confronting X——­ and his sister portrayed very old and feeble people, and were rather moving.  They insisted that they were his parents and wept brokenly in their hands.  But why?  And he denying it!  His sister, who resented all this bitterly and who stood by him valiantly, repudiated, for his sake of course, his and her so-called parents and friends.

I never saw such a running to cover of “friends” in all my life.  Of all those I had seen about his place and in his company, scores on scores of people reasonably well known in the arts, the stage, the worlds of finance and music, all eating his dinners, riding in his cars, drinking his wines, there was scarcely any one now who knew him anything more than “casually” or “slightly”—­oh, so slightly!  When rumors as to the midnight suppers, the Bacchic dancing, the automobile parties to his great country place and the spirited frolics which occurred there began to get abroad, there was no one whom I knew who had ever been there or knew anything about him or them.  For instance, of all the people who had been close or closest and might therefore have been expected to be friendly and deeply concerned was de Shay, his fidus Achates and literally his pensioner—­yet de Shay was almost the loudest in his denunciation or at least deprecation of X——­, his habits and methods!  Although it was he who had told me of Mme. ——­ and her relation to X——­, who urged me to come here, there and the other place, especially where X——­ was the host, always assuring me that it would be so wonderful and that X——­ was really such a great man, so generous, so worth-while, he was now really the loudest or at least the most stand-offish in his comments, pretending never to have been very close to X——­, and lifting his eyebrows in astonishment as though he had not even guessed what he had actually engineered.  His “Did-you-hears,” “Did-you-knows” and “Wouldn’t-have-dreamed” would have done credit to a tea-party.  He was so shocked, especially at X——­’s robbing poor children and orphans, although in so far as my reading of the papers went I could find nothing that went to prove that he had any intention of robbing anybody—­that is, directly.  In the usual Wall Street high finance style he was robbing Peter to pay Paul, that is, he was using the monies of one corporation which he controlled to bolster up any of the others which he controlled, and was “washing one hand with the other,” a proceeding so common in finance that to really radically and truly oppose it, or do away with it, would mean to bring down the whole fabric of finance in one grand crash.