He saw the light flash on Amory's glasses as they turned inquisitively on this and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.
"Ah well," he assured himself, "I'll look them up in a thousand years or so, and we'll dine together, and then we'll say: 'Don't you remember how I didn't know ?'" Immediately there presented himself to them a little man who proved to be Balator, lord-chief-commander of the Royal Golden Guard, and now especially directed by the prince, he pleasantly told them, to be responsible for their entertainment and comfort during the ceremony to follow.

They were, in fact, his guests for the evening, but St.George and Amory were uncertain whether, considering his office, this was a high honour or a kind of exalted durance.
However, as the man was charming the doubt was not important.

He had an attenuated face, so conveniently brown by race as to suggest the most soldierly exposure, and he had great, peaceable, slow-lidded eyes.

He was, they subsequently learned, an authority upon insect life in Yaque, for he had never had the smallest opportunity to go to war.
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.