midnight
With the Christian Mayoress of Middleton to take in to dinner at Sir Asher Aaronsberg 's , Leopold Barstein as a Jewish native of that thriving British centre , should have felt proud and happy . But Barstein was young and a sculptor , fresh from the Paris schools and Salon triumphs . He had long parted company with Jews and Judaism , and to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton seemed unspeakably parochial . In Paris he had danced at night on the Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life , and joined in choruses over midnight bocks ; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless , though many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a blonde radiance all around him . The factories of Middleton , which had manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg , ex-M.P. , and nearly all his wealthy guests , were to his artistic eye an outrage upon a beautiful planet , and he was still in that crude phase of juvenile revolt in which one speaks one 's thoughts of the mess humanity has made of its world . But , unfortunately , the Mayoress of Middleton was deafish , so that he could not even shock her with his epigrams . It was extremely disconcerting to have his bland blasphemies met with an equally bland smile .