with the research of Max Müller and the zeal of Dr. Kenealy.
But the Postiche ball was a much wider, indeed almost an international matter; because the Anglo-Saxon races had staked their lives that it should be a success; and the Latin and Muscovite had declared that it would be a failure; and everybody was dying to go, and yet everybody was ashamed to go, a state of mind which constitutes the highest sort of social ecstacy in this age of composite emotions.
Mr. and Mrs. Joshua R. Postiche, some said, were Jews, and some said were Dutch, and some said were half-castes from Cuba, and some said were Americans from Arkansas, and some said had been usurers, and some gin-spinners, and some opium dealers, and some things even yet worse; at any rate they had amassed, somehow or other, a great deal of money, and had therefore got into society by dint of a very large expenditure and the meekest endurance of insults; and had made an ancient palace as gaudy and garish as any brand-new hotel at Nice or Scarboro', and gathered in it all the cosmopolitan crowd of
