As Balator led his guests to their seats near the throne every one
looked on them, as they passed, with the serenest fellowship, and no
regard persisted longer than a glance, friendly and fugitive.
Balator himself not only refrained from stoning the barbarians with
commonplaces, but he did not so much as mention America to them or
treat them otherwise than as companions, as if his was not only the
cosmopolitanism that knows no municipal or continental aliens of its
own class, but a kind of inter-dimensional cosmopolitanism as well.
"Which," said Amory afterward, "was enviable. The next man from
Trebizond or Saturn or Fez whom I meet I'm going to greet and treat
as if he lived the proverbial 'twenty minutes out.'"
A great clock boomed and throbbed through the palace, striking an
hour that was no more intelligible than the jargon of a ship's clock
to a landsman. Somewhere an orchestra thrilled into haunting sound,
poignant with disclosures barely missed. Overhead, through the
mighty rafters of the conical roof, the moon looked down.
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