gaily-dressed ladies and gentlemen quaintly caparisoned were discharged
at the great iron gates, and went trooping up the path to the flaring
white residence, blazing like a crystal palace in a fairy tale.

Nickie was not exactly envious, but looking through the iron railing at
the gay array of lanterns in the vast garden, and the glowing mansion,
and hearing the hubbub of cheerful voices and the laughter, he had a
dawning sense that respectability, especially well-to-do respectability,
had its compensations after all.

He walked to the gate for a better view, and discovered a strange object
lying on the path. It was a false nose, a large, red, boosy nose, with, a
length of elastic to hold it in its place. One of the guests had dropped
it. Nickie put it on in a waggish humour, and stood moralising as three
pretty Spanish dancers, in charge of a toreador, passed in.

Nickie loved gaiety, waster and rapscallion as he was--sunshine, colour,
flowers, beautiful women, life, music and laughter shook passions loose
within him. Another little kink in his brain might have made a poet of
him, just as the smallest turn of chance might have made a deadbeat of
almost any poet of parts.

Mr. Crips actually sighed over that vision of fair women, and longed to
be that happy toreador.

"Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we, too, into the dust descend:
Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End."