CHAPTER X.
DUSK The Masked Dance was to begin at ten that evening; for that reason dinner had been served early at scores of small tables on the terrace, a hilarious and topsy-turvy, but somewhat rapid affair, because everybody required time for dressing, and already throughout the house maids and valets were scurrying around, unpacking masks and wigs and dainty costumes for the adorning of the guests at Roya-Neh.
Toward nine o'clock the bustle and confusion became distracting; corridors were haunted by graceful flitting figures in various stages of deshabille, in quest of paraphernalia feminine and maids to adjust the same.

A continual chatter filled the halls, punctuated by smothered laughter and subdued but insistent appeals for aid in the devious complications of intimate attire.
On the men's side of the house there was less hubbub and some quiet swearing; much splashing in tubs, much cigarette smoke.

Men entered each other's rooms, half-clad in satin breeches, silk stockings, and ruffled shirts, asking a helping hand in tying queue ribbons or adjusting stocks, and lingered to smoke and jest and gossip, and jeer at one another's finery, or to listen to the town news from those week-enders recently arrived from the city.
The talk was money, summer shows, and club gossip, but financial rumours ruled.
Young Ellis, in pale blue silk and wig, perched airily, on a table, became gloomily prophetic concerning the steady retirement of capital from philanthropic enterprises hatched in Wall Street; Peter Tappan saw in the endlessly sagging market dire disaster for the future digestions of wealthy owners of undistributed securities.
"Marble columns and gold ceilings don't make a trust company," he sneered.

"There are a few billionaire gamblers from the West who seem to think Wall Street is Coney Island.

There'll be a shindy, don't make any mistake; we're going to have one hell of a time; but when it's over the corpses will all be shipped--ahem!--west." Several men laughed uneasily; one or two old line trust companies were mentioned; then somebody spoke of the Minnisink, lately taken over by the Algonquin.
Duane lighted a cigarette and, watching the match still burning, said: "Dysart is a director.