The Imitator

In a fashionable cellar, amid sanded floors, Hungarian violins and champagne, Orson Vane finds society’s latest novelty: pretending to be someone else. Then he drops his own pose and tells his friend the truth: he is tired.

In the early twentieth-century smart set, dining below stairs is the newest amusement—and another imitation soon to pall. Over a bad dinner, Orson and his friend Luke Moncreith trade barbs about a society that borrows its pleasures, manners and even its ideas from others. But beneath Orson’s wit lies a private discontent: though he has youth, money and position, he feels he has done nothing but exist. The arts, too, seem to him like copies of life, and the mask of cleverness offers no refuge. Can Orson find a purpose that is genuinely his?

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