popularity. Here, too, the rooms were thronged and the tables
taken, despite the lateness of the season, but for a second time
Wharton demonstrated that to a man about town of his
accomplishments no place is really closed.

However loud the protest against this latest fad, it is doubtful
if its effect is wholly harmful, for it at least introduced
vigorous exercise and rhythmic movement into the midnight life of
the city. Women went home in the gray dawn with faces flushed from
natural causes; exquisite youths of nocturnal habits learned to
perspire and to know the feeling of a wilted collar.

Bob Wharton had drunk heavily, but up to this time he had shown
little effect from his potations beyond a growing exhilaration;
now, however, the wine was taking toll, and Lorelei felt a certain
pity for him. Waste is shocking; it grieved her to see a man so
blessed with opportunity flinging himself away so fatuously. The
hilarity which greeted him on every hand spoke of misspent nights
and a reckless prodigality that betokened long habitude. Only his
splendid constitution--that abounding vitality which he had
inherited from sturdy, temperate forebears--enabled him to keep up
the pace; but Lorelei saw that he was already beginning to show
its effect. Judging from to-night's experience, he was still, in
his sober moments, a normal person; but once he had imbibed beyond
a certain point his past excesses uncovered themselves like
grinning faces. Alcohol is a capricious master, seldom setting the
same task twice, nor directing his slaves into similar pathways.
He delights, moreover, in reversing the edge of a person's
disposition, making good-natured people pettish or morose, while
he sometimes improves those of naturally evil temper. Often under