"I'll dress these mighty limbs of yours," she cried. "I'll flaunt your very baseness in their eyes. I'll make them crawl to you for the price of a smile from me. They shall pay in deepest humiliation for the privilege of adoring me from afar. We, Paul, you and I, will richly repay society for its wrongs to us."
She seemed now exhausted from the intensity of her feelings.
"Go now," she said, tenderly; and without question Paul went away from her, exalted, bewildered, astonished, uplifted, amazed, but happy, and inwardly rejoicing at the wondrous change which had taken place in his fortunes. Poor fool! From his dizzy height he saw not the chasm yawning in greediness below.
CHAPTER XIII.
A RICH MAN'S BALL.
A great social leader of the Metropolis had given a ball, to which had been invited not only the "Four Hundred," but a large proportion of New York's Bohemian Colony as well.
Olivia Winters had been sent by the city editor of the Daily Tattler to get an account of the affair for her journal. Her reflections as she sat waiting to see the hostess, or some one in her behalf, were neither pleasing nor flattering. "All the world's a fake," she thought, "and the men and women merely fakirs. Within a stone's throw of this place there is a collection of miserable huts.
