Rising, P. Sybarite smiled loftily. "Don't worry about that. If I can't bribe my way past a cordon of mercenary foreign waiters—and talk down any other opposition—I'm neither as flush as I think nor as Irish."
"But what under the sun do you want there?"
"To see what's doing—find out for myself what devilment Brian Shaynon's hatching. Maybe I'll do no good—and maybe I'll be able to put a spoke in his wheel. To do that—once—right—I'd be willing to die as poor as I've lived till this blessed night!"
He paused an instant on the threshold of his cousin's bedroom; turned back a sombre visage.
"I've little love for Brian Shaynon, myself, or none. You know what he did to me—and mine."
BEELZEBUB
Late enough in all conscience was the last guest to arrive for the Hadley-Owen masquerade.
Already town-cars, carriages, and private 'busses were being called for and departing with their share of the more seasoned and sober-sided revellers, to whom bed and appetite for breakfast had come to mean more than a chance to romp through a cotillion by the light of the rising sun—to say discreetly little or nothing of those other conveyances which had borne away their due proportion of far less sage and by no means sober-sided ones, who yet retained sufficient sense of the fitness of things to realise that bed followed by matutinal bromides would be better for them than further dalliance with the effervescent and evanescent spirits of festivity.
More and more frequently the elevators, empty but for their attendants, were flying up to the famous ball-room floor of the Bizarre, to descend heavy-laden with languid laughing parties of gaily-costumed ladies and gentlemen no less brilliantly attired—prince and pauper, empress and shepherdess, monk, milkmaid, and mountebank: all weary yet reluctant in their going.