Behind him he heard Rosalie’s voice, caressing, tormenting by turns; and, glancing around for her victim, beheld Grandcourt at heel in calflike adoration.

Kathleen’s laughter swung him the other way.

“Oh, Duane,” she cried, the pink of excitement in her cheeks, “isn’t it all too heavenly!  It looks like Paradise afire with all those rosy clouds rolling under foot.  Have you ever seen anything quite as charming?”

“It’s rotten,” said Duane brusquely, tearing the tattered lace free and tossing it aside.

“Wh-what!” she exclaimed.

“I say it’s all rotten,” he repeated, looking up at her.  “All this—­the whole thing—­the stupidity of it—­the society that’s driven to these kind of capers, dreading the only thing it ever dreads—­ennui!  Look at us all!  For God’s sake, survey us damn fools, herded here in our pinchbeck mummery—­forcing the sanctuary of these decent green woods, polluting them with smoke and noise and dirty little intrigues!  I’m sick of it!”

“Duane!”

“Oh, yes; I’m one of ’em—­dragging my idleness and viciousness and my stupidity and my money at my heels.  I tell you, Kathleen, this is no good.  There’s a stench of money everywhere; there’s a staler aroma in the air, too—­the dubious perfume of decadence, of moral atrophy, of stupid recklessness, of the ennui that breeds intrigue!  I’m deadly tired of it—­of the sort of people I was born among; of their women folk, whose sole intellectual relaxation is in pirouetting along the danger mark without overstepping, and in concealing it when they do; of the overgroomed men who can do nothing except what can be done with money, who think nothing, know nothing, sweat nothing but money and what it can buy—­like horses and yachts and prima donnas——­”

She uttered a shocked exclamation, but he went on: 

“Yes, prima donnas.  Which of our friends was it who bought that pretty one that sang in ’La Esmeralda’?”

“Duane!” she exclaimed in consternation; but he took her protesting hands in his and held her powerless.

“You happen to be a darling,” he said; “but you were not born to this environment.  Geraldine was—­and she is a darling.  God bless her.  Outside of my sister, Naida, and you two—­with the exception of the newly fledged and as yet mercifully unregurgitated with vicious wisdom—­who are all these people?  Ciphers, save for their balances at their banks; nameless, save for the noisy reiteration of their hard-fisted forebears’ names; without any ambition, except financial and social; without any objective, save the escape from ennui—­without any taste, culture, inspiration, except that of physical gratification!  Oh, Lord, I’m one of them, but I resign to-night.”

“Duane, you’re quite mad,” she said, wrenching her hands free and gazing at him rather fearfully.

“I think he’s dead sensible,” said a calm voice at her elbow; and Scott Seagrave appeared, twirling his mask and blinking at them through his spectacles.