an operatic light, who chanced not to be singing that evening and whom
Ste. Marie had met before. The two others were rather difficult of
classification, but probably, he thought, ornaments of that mysterious
border-land between the two worlds which seems to give shelter to so
many people against whose characters nothing definite is known, but
whose antecedents and connections are not made topics of conversation.
The three ladies seemed to be on very friendly terms with Captain
Stewart, and greeted him with much noisy delight. One of the
unclassified two, when her host, with a glance toward Ste. Marie,
addressed her formally, seemed inordinately amused, and laughed for a
long time.

Within the next hour ten or a dozen other guests had arrived, and they
all seemed to know one another very well, and proceeded to make
themselves quite at home. Ste. Marie regarded them with a reflective and
not over-enthusiastic eye, and he wondered a good deal why he had been
asked here to meet them. He was as far from a prig or a snob as any man
could very well be, and he often went to very Bohemian parties which
were given by his painter or musician friends, but these people seemed
to him quite different. The men, with the exception of two eminent
opera-singers, who quite obviously had been asked because of their
voices, were the sort of men who abound at such places as Ostend and
Monte Carlo, and Baden-Baden in the race week. That is not to say that
they were ordinary racing touts or the cheaper kind of adventurers
(there was a count among them, and a marquis who had recently been
divorced by his American wife), but adventurers of a sort they
undoubtedly were. There was not one of them, so far as Ste. Marie was
aware, who was received anywhere in good society, and he resented very
much being compelled to meet them.