It must be that a strange bundle of passions and vague desires give rise to such a curious social institution or it would not be.
Drouet, for one, was lured as much by his longing for pleasure as by his desire to shine among his betters.

The many friends he met here dropped in because they craved, without, perhaps, consciously analysing it, the company, the glow, the atmosphere which they found.

One might take it, after all, as an augur of the better social order, for the things which they satisfied here, though sensory, were not evil.

No evil could come out of the contemplation of an expensively decorated chamber.

The worst effect of such a thing would be, perhaps, to stir up in the material-minded an ambition to arrange their lives upon a similarly splendid basis.