SELDEN, entering from the dining-room, saw that the lounge was crowded, and he paused for a moment to look about him. It was the half-hour between dinner and the Sporting Club, and he was pleasantly aware of the odours of good coffee and super-excellent tobacco, mingled with the delicate and very expensive perfumes rising from the clothes, the hair, the shoulders of the women lying indolently back in the deep chairs.

It was the women who dominated the scene. There were men present, to be sure, but they were as unobtrusive to the eye, as strictly utilitarian, as the donor kneeling humbly in the corner of the picture before the madonna he had paid to have painted.

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