The Eternal Feminine by Israel Zangwill — Read

He wore a curious costume, representing the devil carrying off his corpse; but I recognised him at once as the lesser lion of a London evening party last season. Then he had just returned from a Polar expedition, and wore the glacier of civilisation on his breast. To-night he was among the maddest of the mad, dancing savagely with the Bacchantes of the Latin Quarter at the art students' ball, and some of his fellow-Americans told me that he was the best marine painter in the _atelier_ which he had joined. More they did not pause to tell me, for they were anxious to celebrate this night of nights, when, in that fine spirit of equality born of belonging to two Republics, the artist lowers himself to the level of his model.

The young Arctic explorer, so entirely at home in this more tropical clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat sadly -- it seemed to me -- at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the shoulders of grotesquely clad men prancing to joyous music. For some time he had been trying hard to get some one to take the money for his supper; but the frenzied waiters suspected he was clamouring for something to eat, and would not be cajoled into attention.