baroness who supports a shiftless husband and their offspring by giving music-lessons; of the retiring scholar who scorns a life of idleness and a coronet besides; of shifty ne'er-do-wells with titles at homes and aliases elsewhere; of fugitive lords and forgotten ladies; of thieves and bauds and wastrels who stand revealed in their extremity as the sons and daughters of noble houses.

In this City of Masks there are hundreds of men and women in whose veins the blood of a sound aristocracy flows. By choice or necessity they have donned the mask of obscurity. They tread the paths of oblivion. They toil, beg or steal to keep pace with circumstance. But the blood will not be denied. In the breast of each of these drifters throbs the pride of birth, in the soul of each flickers the unquenchable flame of caste. The mask is for the man outside, not for the man inside.

Recently there died in one of the municipal hospitals an old flower-woman, familiar for three decades to the thousands who thread their way through the maze of streets in the lower end of Manhattan. To them she was known as Old Peg. To herself she was the Princess Feododric, born to the purple, daughter of one of the greatest families in Russia. She was never anything but the Princess to herself, despite the squalor in which she lived. Her epitaph was written in the bold, black head-lines of the newspapers; but her history was laid away with her mask in a graveyard far from palaces—and flower-stands. Her headstone revealed the uncompromising pride that survived her after death. By her direction it bore the name of Feododric, eldest daughter of His Highness, Prince Michael Androvodski; born in St. Petersburgh, September 12, 1841; died Jan. 7, 1912; wife of James Lumley, of County Cork, Ireland.

It is of the high-born who dwell in low places that this tale is told. It is of an aristocracy that serves and smiles and rarely sneers behind its mask.

When Cricklewick announced the Princess Mariana Theresa the hush of deference fell upon the assembled company. In the presence of royalty no one remained seated.

She advanced slowly, ponderously into the room, bowing right and left as she crossed to the great chair at the upper end. One by one the others presented themselves and kissed the coarse, unlovely hand she held out to them. It was not "make-believe." It was her due. The blood of a king and a queen coursed through her veins; she had been born a Princess Royal.

She was sixty, but her hair was as black as the coat of the raven. Time, tribulation, and a harsh destiny had put each its own stamp upon her dark, almost sinister, face. The black eyes were sharp and calculating, and they did not smile with her thin lips. She wore a great amount of jewellery and a gown of blue velvet, lavishly bespangled and generously embellished with laces of many periods, values and, you could say, nativity.

The Honourable Mrs. Priestly-Duff having been a militant suffragette before a sudden and enforced departure from England, was the only person there with the hardihood to proclaim, not altogether sotto voce, that the "get-up" was a fright.

Restraint vanished the instant the last kiss of tribute fell upon her knuckles. The Princess put her hand to her side, caught her breath sharply, and remarked to the Marchioness, who stood near by, that it was dreadful the way she was putting on weight. She was afraid of splitting something if she took a long, natural breath.

"I haven't weighed myself lately," she said, "but the last time I had this dress on it felt like a kimono. Look at it now! You could not stuff a piece of tissue paper between it and me to save your soul. I shall have to let it out a couple of—What were you about to say, Count Fogazario?"

The little Count, at the Marchioness's elbow, repeated something he had already said, and added:

"And if it continues there will not be a trolley-car running by midnight."

The Princess eyed him coldly. "That is just like a man," she said. "Not the faintest idea of what we were talking about, Marchioness."

The Count bowed. "You were speaking of tissue paper, Princess," said he, stiffly. "I understood perfectly."

Once a week the Marchioness held her amazing salon. Strictly speaking, it was a co-operative affair. The so-called guests were in reality contributors to and supporters of an enterprise that had been going on for the matter of five years in the heart of unsuspecting New York. According to his or her means, each of these exiles paid the tithe or tax necessary, and became in fact a member of the inner circle.

From nearly every walk in life they came to this common, converging point, and sat them down with their equals, for the moment laying aside the mask to take up a long-discarded and perhaps despised reality. They became lords and ladies all over again, and not for a single instant was there the slightest deviation from dignity or form.

Moral integrity was the only requirement, and that, for obvious reasons, was sometimes overlooked,—as for example in the case of the Countess who eloped with the young artist and lived in complacent shame and happiness with him in a three-room flat in East Nineteenth street. The artist himself was barred from the salon, not because of his ignoble action, but for the sufficient reason that he was of ignoble birth. Outside the charmed conclave he was looked upon as a most engaging chap. And there was also the case of the appallingly amiable baron who had fired four shots at a Russian Grand-Duke and got away with his life in spite of the vaunted secret service. It was of no moment whatsoever that one of his bullets accidentally put an end to the life of a guardsman. That was merely proof of his earnestness and in no way reflected on his standing as a nobleman. Nor was it adequate cause for rejection that certain of these men and women were being sought by Imperial Governments because they were political fugitives, with prices on their heads.

The Marchioness, more prosperous than any of her associates, assumed the greater part of the burden attending this singular reversion to form. It was she who held the lease on the building, from cellar to roof, and it was she who paid that important item of expense: the rent. The Marchioness was no other than the celebrated Deborah, whose gowns issuing from the lower floors at prodigious prices, gave her a standing in New York that not even the plutocrats and parvenus could dispute. In private life she may have been a Marchioness, but to all New York she was known as the queen of dressmakers.

If you desired to consult Deborah in person you inquired for Mrs. Sparflight, or if you happened to be a new customer and ignorant, you were set straight by an attendant (with a slight uplifting of the eyebrows) when you asked for Madame "Deborah."

The ownership of the rare pieces of antique furniture, rugs, tapestries and paintings was vested in two members of the circle, one occupying a position in the centre of the ring, the other on the outer rim: Count Antonio Fogazario and Moody, the footman. For be it known that while Moody reverted once a week to a remote order of existence he was for the balance of the time an exceedingly prosperous, astute and highly respected dealer in antiques, with a shop in Madison Avenue and a clientele that considered it the grossest impertinence to dispute the prices he demanded. He always looked forward to these "drawing-rooms," so to speak. It was rather a joy to disregard the aspirates. He dropped