I
Lee Clavering’s weary eyes—steel-blue, half closed—roved over the darkened auditorium.
Twelve years ago he had migrated from pre-civil-war Louisiana to Manhattan, the Brains of America—from the ante-bellum to the cerebellum. In that time he had attained the highest position in the gift of the nation. Poets, playwrights, players, painters, pugilists, politicians, prophets, priests, popes, presidents, princes and pullman-car porters cringed before him.
He was L. C., the premier columnist of America, the King Kleagle of the Kolyumist Klan.
His long dark face suggested the cynical, the mysterious, the morose. But his steel-blue eyes were now, as always, searching, with the evergreen hope of finding the consummate woman, which proves him really romantic. That he found her in a New York first-night audience proves him a character in fiction.