chair in a content so rich it was nearer ecstasy. He could not bear to
disturb the possession joy had taken of him, and, like a half-awake boy
clinging to a dream that his hitherto unkind sweetheart has kissed him,
lingered on in the enchanted atmosphere, his eyes still full of all they
had beheld with such delight, detaining and smiling upon each revelation
of this fresh memory--the flashingly lovely faces, the dreamily lovely
faces, the pearls and laces of the anemone ladies, the color and
romantic fashion of the uniforms, and the old princes who had been
pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white mustaches and single
eye-glasses, as he had so long hoped and dreamed they did.

"Mine own people!" he whispered. "I have come unto mine own at last.
Mine own people!" After long waiting (he told himself), he had seen
them--the people he had wanted to see, wanted to know, wanted to
be _of!_ Ever since he had begun to read of the "beau monde" in his
schooldays, he had yearned to know some such sumptuous reality as that
which had come true to-day, when, at last, in Rome he had seen--as he
wrote home that night--"the finest essence of Old-World society mingling
in Cosmopolis."

Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd that had
worn them) still hung about him; he breathed them deeply, his eyes
half-closed and his lips noiselessly formed themselves to a quotation
from one of his own poems:

While trails of scent, like cobweb's films
Slender and faint and rare,
Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics,
Cling on the stirless air,
The sibilance of voices,