THE senator and Egeria sat in the rich man’s tent—a marble palace by the sea—and the little nook in the supper room upon which they had fastened their desire was at last untenanted. Now they slipped into the recently vacated chairs with a smile of content into each other’s eyes across the board.
“A moment ago,” said the senator, unfolding his napkin, “we gazed at those who slowly sipped their coffee and wished that our belief still held its lost Paradise—Hell—that we might mentally consign them thither. A moment since we were the people, hungry, clamorous, watching them ‘spill the bread and spoil the wine.’ In the twinkling of an eye our attitude changed. We now look with indifferent scorn upon the waiting mob, and advise them if they have no bread to eat cake. What a range of experience it gives us! We are one with the labor agitator elevated to the presidency of a trust. We are the men in the saddle—after us, the deluge!”
“We are the conquerors, at any rate,” observed Egeria. “Ours is this delicate pâté, this soft, smooth wine. Vive le rich man! May he entertain oftener! It is unsurpassed.”
“Save by Nature,” returned the senator. “You have failed to notice that she too entertains to-night. What a fête! The sea dashing the froth of its ‘night and its might’ against the wall, that arch of honeysuckle, sweeter than a bank of violets, and yonder pale siren, the moon! Fair to-night, I drink to you!”
“After all,” mused Egeria, “the high gods bestowed on Nature a woman’s privilege—the last word. Art may declaim, Science explain, Religion dogmatize; but Nature has the last word.”
“And the last word, the one word, the eternal word, is ‘beauty,’” he amended.
Egeria shrugged her shoulders. “A matter of surfaces. The mask nature wears to hide her hideous processes of decay. As the lovely heroine of a recent novel says, ‘the beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis.’”
“A superficial and essentially feminine point of view,” commented the senator. “Beauty”—with a wave of the hand—“is a matter of the soul. The skin-deep variety is not worth considering.”
“But most women would pay the price of a pound of radium for that infinitesimal depth,” she returned, flippantly.
“Your sex is hardly a judge of what constitutes feminine beauty.” There was condescension in the senator’s tone. “Here, I can prove the point for you. Grant me your indulgence and I will tell you a little story.” The senator rather fancied himself as a raconteur.