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 that some mysterious principle, perhaps inherent in his own temperament, but none the less potent for that, was operating against him. Love, pleasure, the joy of work, the sense of contributing a quota to the profitable activities of the universe, of helping to further the aims of God,—all were denied him. In the place of such satisfactions was the burden of his own uncertainties. And the vision of Léon's sister, that astonishing apparition, instead of bringing him a joy that another man would have known how to wring out of it, merely taunted him.

He could not bring himself to return to the flat. Mme. Choiseul was under the weather. Her avoué had bungled some business for her, something to do with interest on a mortgage, and she had come out in red spots and taken to her bed, leaving a half-finished paint job on the kitchen floor. The apartment was vaguely redolent of woe and indigestion and turpentine and perfidy nobly, if very vocally, borne with; it held no charm for him. He turned on his heel and walked aimlessly, through the Place Clichy, along the cold, sordid boulevards of Montmartre, his feet damp, his mind dizzy, bewildered, crushed, and resigned. He dreamed of a Sophie Scantleberry twenty years younger, and cursed the fate that hadn't allowed them to be contemporaries.

The street lamps were making great dirty yellow moons in the greenish twilight. He had gone as far as the Place de la République and turned into a narrow

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 side-street where his attention was caught by the semiclandestine character of a dingy bar which bore the legend, in half obliterated lettering: Café International. International dregs, if anything, he reflected, and partly out of curiosity, partly out of weariness and a desire to hide, he entered and sat in a dim corner, ordering a hot grog to counteract the effects of his chill.

A handful of sinister but harmless young men sat about the room and he overheard scraps of strange talk,—talk which accorded with the gaudy and shabby purple crepe paper roses sewn upon the orange cotton lampshades. A smoky, smutty, indefinably illicit rendezvous. Except for the inevitable fat woman enthroned at the caisse, there was only one other woman in the dive, and she seemed oddly out of place, though apparently quite at home.

She was a street girl, and to judge by her neat costume and clear blue eyes, a reasonably successful one, but to Grover's mind, which today was exceptionally alive to every feminine manifestation, she was bafflingly different from the creatures who were forever begging cigarettes and whom one was forever sending about their business. For one thing there was no sign of a challenge in her candid regard. The eyes met one steadily enough, but there was in them a light which he could only describe to himself as "good."

At Harvard a popular professor of literature had railed against the sentimentalists who confused the

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 psychology of saints and prostitutes. As Grover watched this girl sipping her cherry brandy he diverted himself by confuting the arguments of his professor. Sooner or later life riddled all academic theories, and sooner or later one found oneself willy-nilly on the side of the sentimentalists. At any rate here was a little prostitute capable of something very like saintliness,—Grover was ready to swear to it. No vice was unfamiliar to her; possibly no vice repellent, yet at this moment her countenance, like a mirror which remains unsoiled by the murkiest of its reflections, conveyed an impression of essential virginity.

As the strong, hot grog stole through him, his fancy became abnormally active and wove a background for the tidy, blond girl in the corner. He pictured her alone in a little room, mending her clothes, possibly with glasses on to save her eyes, sipping teaspoonfuls of a bitter tonic to save her health, preparing a fortifying breakfast of milk and eggs, tucking away the earnings of the previous night, making a laborious calculation of the amount still needed to buy herself a coat trimmed with fur, writing an illiterate postcard to a more fortunate friend whose lover had carried her off to Monte Carlo, giving a final touch to her lips and eyebrows, a little dab of polish to her shoes, pausing before going out to exchange the time of day with the concierge's wife, partly from policy, partly from a craving for some respectable woman's good will.

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 Any adjective adequately descriptive of her, he reflected, must have started with a "w". Wistful, winsome, weary all applied, yet these adjectives bore merely a family resemblance to some as yet uncoined word that would define her identity. Perhaps the adjective was uncoined because the girl herself was in a sense uncoined. She was ready to be minted, yet the moment she should become stamped and put into currency at one irremediable valuation her most precious quality must inevitably be lost. Physically she had been in currency for some time,—on that score there was no possible doubt,—but some elusive quality, the quality that set her apart not only from women of her class but from all other women, had never been handled; that, to Grover's intuition, was equally patent.

Once more she looked up from her glass and met his gaze, steadily but not boldly. To his dismay then he heard his own voice saying to her, "May I offer you a drink?"

Calmly, a little hostilely, almost shyly, and with only a moment's hesitation she accepted, and he crossed to her table, conscious of a renewed buzz of chatter in the room. One of the neighbors had the temerity to call out, teasingly, almost affectionately, "Vas-y, Marthe. Enfin tu tes appliquée un Américain. Demandes-lui un manteau de fourrure; il fera frats ce soir."

"Ta gueule!" retorted Marthe, unmoved.

To Grover it seemed that the young men were on

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 Marthe's social level—in a sense colleagues. This impression floated through his mind as he exchanged commonplaces with her. In her remarks there was no indication of an attempt to be superior to her surroundings, but as she talked the immaculate quality came through even more arrestingly than ever. With the point of view of the gutter she displayed the instincts of a lady. Even the daintiness of her handkerchief, the freshness of her linen collar and cuffs, the care she had given to her nails were indicative of self-respect rather than coquetry. She had admitted, with a laugh quite free from shame, that she was engaged in la lucrative inconduite and that she was one of those creatures who can be obtained "by the dozen,"—to which Grover's honest retort was that she was a specimen apart.

Not the least unusual manifestation was her insistence on offering him a drink in return for' his, On a sure instinct he accepted, and was glad he had done so when he saw the pretty little flare of pride in her eyes as she gave the order,—not imperiously, but gently, almost confidentially.

"You don't look French," Grover remarked.

"I'm Alsatian," said Marthe. "Can't you tell from my accent! On the street they call me the milkmaid! When they're not calling me cow!" she added with a ribald laugh.

"Are you married?" asked Grover, unable to resist at least one intrusive question.

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 Marthe looked at him for a moment, on guard, then replied tactfully, "My man was a cook at a big hotel in Lucerne. We have not been together for years."

"Was he unkind to you?"

"He promised me the blue dome of heaven," said Marthe, then added with irresistible merriment, "and all he gave me was a little dark cloud. . . But it wasn't his fault. Men are like that. They can't help it. What do you expect!"

"I? Nothing."

"Eh bien! Santé!" And they drank to their friendship.

Her age was a puzzle. At moments she looked not more than eighteen, with her smooth skin and fine hair. At other moments, especially when she drooped forward on the table, she looked thirty-five. Once she left him and, a few moments later, came back into the room strangely refreshed. He had seen into enough back-rooms of Paris to know that she had been sniffing cocaine.

Across the room in the murky light he had been observing a white-haired old man with tired eyes and the bearing that is possible only to a man accustomed to homage. In answer to his inquiry Marthe mentioned the old man's name, whereupon Grover realized that he was looking at a great philosopher, a man whose dicta had been reverently cited to him by more than one of his professors. With the old man was a tall, sightly youth whose eyes were jocund, whose

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 clothes were of the best, and who looked pleasantly brainless enough to be the complement of Kant himself. Instead of being awe-struck by the words of wisdom which must have been issuing from the mouth of the sage, the young man picked them up and tossed them back with a charming, perverse flippancy.

Youth, Grover was thinking, has the right to be rude; it's so indispensable. All the more right in that youth is too young to know how to drive a bargain. When its clothes are bought for it, it doesn't see that its soul is being taxed on the side.

"My best friend," Marthe was telling him, "is an old old man,—older than that one—a Vicomte. He comes here to see me three or four times a year. He wants nothing of me at all—he has never wanted anything—I have never seen him outside this room. He says it is my hair he comes to see. He makes me take off my hat so that he may stroke it. Everybody in the room giggles, but he doesn't notice. Then he weeps a little and gives me heaps of money, and goes away. And I know he will come back."

"Have you no girl friends?"

Marthe shrugged her shoulders, thereby dismissing her own sex.

"I have a friend who comes Fridays. It's her day off. She is an English Miss in a rich family. She hopes to reform me," and Marthe burst into a rippling laugh. She was not scornful of the good Miss's futile zeal, but genuinely appreciative of its humorous

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 aspect, as well as affectionately tolerant of her friend's quixoticism.

"You are here often?"

"Every day. I never go to work before midnight."

"Then I shall certainly see you again," said Grover, getting up from the table.

"Au plaisir, Monsieur," said Marthe, giving him her hand with a return of her impersonally polite manner.

The encounter had cheered him strangely, and as he made his way homeward he marvelled once more at the ewige weibliche. In all the women he had known and liked there was that unaccountable, deep, lovely goodness which, while often blind and occasionally complicated by opposing and destructive instincts, seemed to be at the source of all their actions. Why don't I apply a woman to myself, he chided himself querulously, in the slang of Marthe's cafe. He was tired of making excuses for not having a bonne amie. Mme. Choiseul was almost rude to him because of his lack of amorous complications. "Voyons!" she had one day protested, "it's not healthy to be so much alone. Take a little friend: you have only to make a sign and you can have your choice!"

All I need, he reflected, in supreme discontent, is a burning love affair. But life put so many obstacles in one's way. The ones you wanted you couldn't have; the ones you could have didn't tempt you.

In bed with his light turned off he tried to recapture the image of the girl seated on Noémi Janvier's piano,

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 but it escaped him. Even the image is unattainable, he complained.

But just before he fell asleep it returned with striking clearness and suddenness, in the form of the expression of hardness he had noted when he first saw her and she had mistaken him for her brother. The softer, gentler, friendly expression refused to come back for him.

For several days, at dusk, he returned to the dingy Café International. Marthe was always in her corner, always tidy and fresh and shy. She arrived between five and six each afternoon, after breakfast, and left promptly at midnight.

It was a great comfort to talk to Marthe, a great comfort to know one person to whom one could confess one's darkest secrets without losing caste. The society of these outcasts solaced him. If he did not share their weaknesses, he at least shared with them the sense of being a misfit, coming in as he often did after many hours of toil before the easel he had set up in his bedroom.

His friendship with Marthe was delicate, yet clearly defined. Its peculiar nature was soon comprehended and respected by the habitués of the cafe. It had never occurred to him to speak to Marthe otherwise than he would have spoken to a lady, and it soon became apparent that Marthe had determined to keep him on

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 a pedestal. Not even when she had been far gone under the influence of drink or drugs had she overstepped the boundary he had unconsciously set. With the others she might exchange hilarious obscenities, but with him, except for licenses of vocabularlyvocabulary [sic] and topic appropriate to their setting, her behavior was blameless, her tact perfect. In the course of time it was no secret that Marthe had fallen wildly in love with her polite cavalier, but there was a tacit understanding that she was to be allowed to play her own game as she saw fit. To Mme. Annoni, the woman at the caisse, Marthe had made full confession. "It's better as it is," she had concluded, in tears. "I suffer, but what exquisite suffering! Promise never to let him know."

Mme. Annoni had promised, and promptly reported the confession.

One evening, after a day devoted to experimental painting in accordance with technical hints he had obtained from a master at the Beaux Arts to whom Casimir had recommended him, Grover arrived late at the cafe. Somewhat the worse for her favorite cherry brandies, of which he suspected her of having consumed more than her usual number out of disappointment at his absence, Marthe was on the point of leaving, and he begged her to remain a while longer.

"Why should I wait?" she laughed, a little hysterically. "What am I to you? Why don't you spend

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 your time with women who have something you want?"

Grover shrugged his shoulders with much the same implication that had characterized her own disposal of his inquiry as to her women friends.

"It gets on my nerves," she protested, sitting at his side and calling for the waiter with a tinge of boisterousness which was unlike her.

"I'm sorry," said Grover wearily. "You needn't wait if you would rather go."

Marthe sat in silence, and when he turned to look at her he found her weeping. He took her hand in his and stroked it.

Marthe was impatient with herself. As quickly as she could she regained control, and asked him in such a matter of fact tone what he had been doing all day that he laughed.

"Painting bad pictures," he replied.

"Of a woman?"

"No. Of a camelia."

She was biting her lips, but suddenly threw her arms about his neck and kissed him, smiling brightly through her tears. "Je t'aime, va!" she cried, and snuggled close beside him, listening to the tick of his watch, caressing his hands in her old trustful manner, her foot beating a quick nervous tatoo in time to the wretched music that was emerging from the back of the room, This hysteria was a characteristic reaction from the fits of extreme depression to which she was

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 subject. One of these days, Grover was thinking, she will break under one or the other of the two moods. To dwell upon the future in store for her was intolerable.

"Last night I had a priest," Marthe was inconsequentially telling him. "If you had only seen him cross himself!

Grover failed to join in the outburst of laughter which this anecdote, overheard by their immediate neighbors, occasioned, and Marthe shook him, as if to rouse him out of his moodiness.

"I must go to work," she remonstrated. "It's late."

He paid for the drinks and walked out with her. At the corner Marthe stopped, in embarrassment. He assumed that they had reached her regular beat and that she was tactfully taking leave of him.

Being unusually restless he was unwilling to part from her. "Come a little way with me," he pleaded, and suddenly she became docile.

They walked for a long time in silence.

"You're in the moon," she remarked discontentedly.

As a matter of fact he might well have been on another planet so little did he feel himself in contact with his kind. The man in his shoes was a stranger to him, and an indifferent one. The little figure walking forlornly at his side moved him to pity. In a sense he felt responsible for her. A doom was over her which he could certainly not prevent, but which he felt he should at least try, in some manner, to mitigate.

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 His moodiness had chastened her, killed the hilarity that had been in her manner earlier in the evening. He guessed that there were still tears for her to shed before the night was over. It was grossly unfair, he chided himself, to have created a difficult situation for her and then leave her to solve it. As they made their way along the crowded boulevards it was strange to realize that if he were to stop and suggest on the spot that they leave at once for South America she would agree as fatalistically as if he had suggested another cherry brandy. And here he was unreasonably detaining her when she might be forgetting her woes in the arms of some nameless passer-by.

At length they found themselves before a big theatre where a mass of bizarre figures were arriving for a fancy dress ball.

"Oh, que c'est joli!" cried Marthe with a mercurial change of mood. She was now like an enraptured child before a windowful of dolls. "Let's stop and watch them, veux-tu?"

They paused at the edge of a carpet spread from the doorway to the curb. Devils and cardinals, shepherdesses and South Sea Islanders scurried past, shivering in the night air.

"Voilà Colombine et Harlequin qui s'amènent," said Marthe in glee, and Grover smiled at the sight of a fat, fair-haired man squeezing himself out of a taxicab and fumbling absent-mindedly in his enormous tights for a pocket which wasn't there. Columbine, in a thin

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 cloak, was capering about him and urging him to hurry. "Your money is inside your shirt," she reminded him.

Suddenly, her attention attracted by a remark of Marthe's, Columbine caught sight of Grover, and her eyes, from behind their black domino, scrutinized him a moment. Then she dove forward and withdrew some notes from the hand of her corpulent escort.

"There! For the stockings!" she said, placing the money in Grover's hand.

For a moment he stood dumb, not taking it in. Then as her heels flicked past and she vanished through the doors of the theatre, he knew, with an elated throb, that it was Olga.

"Mais!" he exclaimed, looking from the money in his hand to the girl at his side. He had fallen out of the moon with a thud that dazed him.

Marthe's steady eyes had seen more than his own. They were now saying for her what her lips would have been too proud to utter: So that's your type!

He heard a cold little voice. "I've come far enough with you. I must run away. Bon soir!" and she was off before he could stop her.

This desertion annoyed him. He was also annoyed at Olga, though tingling with a romantic excitement.

Olga had come back to him. Perhaps she existed—in reality after all. Perhaps—

But her ponderous friend?

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 made you self-conscious in the extreme to attempt to be true to a nice little talent, and week by week Grover's drawing was becoming worse, if anything. During this difficult interval, he argued, he might as well pick up all the technical tricks he could, and, weary of trying to express his immortal soul through messy renderings of what he could see from the window of his bedroom, he gave himself over to a course with the master at the Beaux Arts and afternoons at the life class in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. At least his pencil and brush strokes were becoming more professional; he had advanced to the point where he could place a line or a curve fairly accurately at the first shot, and his sketches no longer had the blurred, fuzzy, tentative and rubbed-out appearance they once had had.

His social energy was being economized too, for he dissipated less time in the cafes and studios. Léon, for whom he had eagerly searched after the encounter with his sister, was out of town; there was a report that he had gone to Cannes. As Grover had read a news item to the effect that Mme. Janvier had returned from America and was resting at her villa on the Riviera, there was an obvious deduction to be made.

One March afternoon he stood at the window of the grande pièce and gazed down at the little laundry, at the end of his resources. To remain indoors seemed futile, to go out more so. Hanging before his eyes was an old-fashioned translucent portrait on glass of

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Rh a new method of feeding the men which I believe will work satisfactorily. This work will be under the supervision of Captain Armstrong. The captain of the ship and myself made a detailed inspection of troop quarters, latrines, wash rooms, galleys and decks each day at 10:30 a. m.

Confidential

Special Orders No. 133.

41. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hyde Pratt, 105th Engineers, senior officer in command of troops on board S. S. TALTHYBIUS, sailing from Canadian Pacific Piers, Montreal, Quebec, about May 26, 1918, will, upon boarding the ship, assume command of all troops on board. Copies to:
 * 2—C. O. Troops on board.
 * 1—Adj. General.
 * 1—S. S. Captain.
 * 1—G. S. A. T. S.

RH:RM

 * By Command of Major General Shanks.

(Seal)

Official:

Lieut.-Col. A. G.,

Acting Chief of Staff.

 * Adjutant.

May 29, 1918, on Transport Talthybius, Wednesday. All day long we have been sailing across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, most of the time out of sight of any land. Just before dark, 7:30 p. m., we came abreast of Newfoundland; and at 10:30 p. m., were abreast Cape Ray light. At this point we turned south en route to Halifax. Encountered several fog banks, but most of the day we were free from fog. Started our observers (or submarine lookouts) at work today under the direction of Lieutenant Thorne. At night ship is perfectly dark, no lights whatever allowed on deck, cabin or troop decks if there is any chance whatever of their being seen from outside. It is still very cold and heavy clothes and overcoats are needed. Some motion to boat this p. m. and several were seasick.

May 30, 1918, on Transport Talthybius, Thursday. Awoke this morning at 6 a. m. We are sailing southwest for Halifax


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 a dark man with a patriarchal beard, the sole reminder of Mme. Choiseul's one moment of bliss. Madame had two egos; one of them endlessly aspired, the other took its twin by the hand and led it to disaster. For every will o' the wisp in her life there had been a substantial bog. As a little girl she had been obsessed with a desire to be able to blow her nose as mightily as the farmer who sat ahead of her in church, in her native Luxembourg, and with that lamentable object in view she had tried to enlarge her nose by filling it every day with cherry pits. One day, after she had established a record, one of the pits declined to come out. It had got lost under the bridge, but soon revealed its whereabouts by raising a lump like a radish, and the little girl had to be taken to the doctor to have the pit extracted, then to the cure to be admonished for her vanity, and all these trials had left her still unable to rival the farmer in church.

Her whole life had been like that. At the age of seventeen she had come to Paris and entered a milliner's shop from which she had been honorably rescued by the proprietor of a doubtful hotel, whom she married not because she loved him but because she was afraid he might kill her if she didn't. After fifteen years of oppression he died and left her a little money of which she was slowly but surely bereft by her men of affairs. She set up a pension of her own, but her pensionnaires neglected to pay their bills, finding it more to their purpose to borrow her money. She

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 reached the age of forty, and her prospects were of the dreariest, when Prince Charming made a belated appearance in the form of an elderly government official of Madagascar who had come to Paris to take a vacation and see the Great Exposition. He had plenty of funds, a boyish heart, and a quite Madagascan intensity. Madame, who had never been able to resist prose, was not likely to resist the first breath of poetry to be infused into her troubled life, and she was only too happy to allow herself to be feted, to be taken to restaurants and theatres, not to mention the exposition and the new Eiffel Tower. They went on excursions to Ostend and Strasbourg, and ended by becoming engaged. Madame was in raptures. The fiancé was to return home and prepare a mansion, and she was to follow in two months—by freight, as Grover put it to himself.

But Paris, Madame, the Eiffel Tower, and especially the return sea voyage proved too much for the brave old gentleman, and he died incontinently upon his arrival at Mozambique. Madame was in the midst of settling her affairs and assembling a trousseau when she received the news. In desolation she retired with the remainder of her fortunes and furniture to the rue Truffaut,—that, reflected Grover, is when the big clock stopped forever,—and hung the translucent portrait of her dead gallant in the front window. He was a standard by whom Madame measured all humanity, chiefly her men of affairs, to their great disadvantage.

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 This afternoon she had come out in red spots again and taken to her bed. A new maid, the tenth or twelfth since Grover's advent, was making sullen journeys from the kitchen to the bedroom with cold water and vinegar. Her manner let it be known that she thought her mistress's head was aching on purpose.

Through his own head, as he stood desperately at the window, idle, unrelated thoughts were wandering. Rhoda Marple wouldn't have let a stranger buy stockings for her; she would have waited for Father, or John, or Spike Daggett, or she would have had enough in her purse, or she would have bought a reel of silk and a needle and mended the tear, or rather, she wouldn't have torn the stocking at all because she wouldn't have been rushing across town alone to keep a squinty appointment in a studio. Was Olga a model? Probably not, for it had been late in the afternoon, and models functioned in the light of morning. Though what a joy to portray that cool, clear, white, firm flesh with its shadows of honey and amber.

As he hummed the tune he wondered whether he was being morbidly sentimental. Mme. Choiseul was right: it was unhealthy to be so much alone, unhealthy to keep conjuring up the picture of a girl who was no more to him than a flitting vision. Rather than remain in his present slough he ought to force himself to be

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 sociable. He thought of Marthe, and he thought of Floss, and without enthusiasm east the die in favor of the latter. The princess's friends were sometimes trying, but they provided food for thought. Floss kept open house for "interesting" people,—that is to say, people who were like the girls in Frances Marple's ditty, of whom one could dance and one could sing and one could play the violing. For Floss anything printed was literature; anything played was music; whatever interesting people fabricated was art,—and she adored art. If her guests were wicked, as well as interesting, no harm done, for Floss relished a faint odor of sin. If they were neither interesting nor wicked, but had clean faces and were acquainted with somebody, that sufficed. He envied Floss her easy enthusiasms.

When he arrived im the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne he found the usual Sunday afternoon crush. By twos and threes Floss's lost souls came straggling in and her salon was a babel of dialects including many bad versions of French and English,—rather a pleasant babel till it struck on that flat, vacant ledge of mind laid bare by the nervous fatigue of too much observing, when the babel became as meaningless and disagreeable as an equivalent volume of rattling kitchenware. In one such moment, when he was sitting on a puffy sofa between a bilious poet, who was allowing himself for a monetary consideration to be divorced in favor of a senator, and an aging actress who was urging the poet

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 to write her a tragedy, Grover looked up to see Floss beckoning to him from a table where she was refreshing herself. To speak with him privately she dismissed her complaisant prince, who crossed the room to greet the Marchesa's Spaniard. The Spaniard, Grover had learned, was a highly prosperous painter named Peñaverde, a name which awakened an echo in his mind but which he couldn't place.

"Don't stand too near the fireplace, darling," Floss called out after her husband, "You might melt and run in." This was in allusion to a favorite household jest which had it that the prince was made of wax and spent all his off hours as a lay figure in the window of a tailor shop in the rue Tronchet.

"Have a drink," she proposed to Grover, then surprised him by asking him what was the matter.

"Nothing that I know of. Why?"

Floss studied him with an impersonal partiality as she sipped tea. She seemed to be bringing something out from the private apartments of her mind which were usually as open to view as her house. "When you smile," she finally said, "it's like flashlight photographs—then you go all dark. I've noticed it often, honey, and I think it's too bad. Life's not worth it, you know; the thing to do is grab it up, dirt and all. Sometimes I think you wait for it to come in on a platter, all dainty and tasty."

"It's not entirely that," said Grover thoughtfully, and the sudden earnestness of their talk struck him as

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 incongruous against the motley and specious disarray of the background: the ribald badinage, the hoarse laughter, the provocative glances, the cynical judgments, the overdressed and wornout bodies, the dyed heads,—even Filoss's gilded fluff. "I think it's largely a matter of appetite; you see I'm not really hearty."

"I like you for being choosey, honey—but there isn't always ice-cream and truffles on the bill of fare, and it's more sensible to gulp down a bit of tripe and onions than go hungry."

"I'm not hungry," he laughed.

"Oh yes you are," she maintained. "I'm worried about you. . . Now wouldn't you think," she broke off, as she saw Mamie Mangum sink into the sofa he had abandoned, "that a floppy girl like that would know enough to wear floppy hats! But no, she goes on wearing those darn tight little things till she's most wore her eyebrows off."

Grover's gaze had wandered from Mamie to the door where a group of new arrivals was being welcomed by the prince. For weeks he had been gambling with himself on the chances of a third and definitive encounter with Olga Vaudreuil, and just as he had resigned himself to his losses, there she stood, beside a fat man whom he recognized as the burlesque harlequin. Something was happening within Grover which bore an analogy to Floss's description of his smile—a great flare followed by a great darkness. As though some overpoweringly fragrant flower had been thrust

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 before him he felt a little nauseated. He would never have believed that the sight of one ordinary little person,—for after all she wasn't so extraordinary,—could filt him at the same time with such a wild uprush of hope and such an utter sense of hopelessness. It was like having your wings clipped within flying distance of heaven.

"There's Oscar Hellgren," said Floss, setting down her cup with a beam of pleasure.

"Who's he?" said Grover.

"The sculptor!" replied Floss, as though anybody ought to know. "He won the prize for a marvellous monument in Bordeaux—soldiers and horses and tanks and everything."

"Isn't that Léon Vaudreuil's sister with him?" asked Grover, to sound Floss.

"Never saw her before," said Floss, going toward the newcomers. "She must be the cutie they're all trying to get away from him."

Grover followed in her wake, but before he could contrive to renew his acquaintance with Olga, she and her Swedish escort were captured by Peñaverde, the painter, and in a moment he found himself in the middle of the big room alone, the most completely lost of all Floss's lost souls.

"You hook like you'd been shot at and missed," said a voice, and he perceived Mamie approaching with languishing gait.

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 "That's strange," he said trucullently. "I'm an easy enough target."

Mamie stood there, making horrid little pushing noises, and looking dreadfully arch. "You never say anything that anybody can understand," she complained.

"Do you want a drink?" he suggested. It was the least ambiguous remark that occurred to him, and he had to say something.

He felt as though he could do with another himself, and steered Mamie to the table. Impossible as Mamie was, she was at least a safe haven for the moment, and there was nobody else to turn to. All afternoon she had been practising new gestures before she forgot them and breaking inanely into other people's conversations with her utterly non-Gallic but painstakingly foreign French. If she only had a sense of humor she'd be gorgeous, he was thinking, pouring Mamie the mildest beverage he could find, in view of her coddled throat. The gold embroidery on her black satin dress was ravelling, the pollen on her sallow face had dusted off on her chest. You could hardly call it a bosom, thought Grover. . How anything as long and narrow as Mamie could, on occasion, make such prodigious volumes of sound was, to Grover, as to everybody else, a mystery. She must be all hings, like sea-weed, he concluded. Mamie disapproved of the old school of operatics that taught you to walk eight paces towards the footlights with your hand over your

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 heart then stop and lift it sweepingly up and backward. She contended that gesture should be spontaneous. Hence she lifted her hands sweepingly up and backward whenever she was seized with the thought of doing so, and if you weren't careful she'd spill your drink.

"Don't you love Paris?" said Mamie.

"No," Grover replied, unwilling to agree with Mamie on any subject. "I detest it."

"What do you stay for, then?"

"Because I hate all the other places more."

"Oh, aren't you difficile!"

"Are you going to sing this afternoon?"

"Floss wants me to."

Grover doubted it but finished his drink in silence, contemplating a series of moves that would bring him into the vicinity of Olga.

"She invited Tamponi to hear me. He knows dozens of impresarios. Or is it ii, Highbrow?"

"Os will do."

"That's him over there by the piano talking to the girl in nasturtium velvet. Who is she?"

Nasturtium—that was it. He had been trying to find a name for the daring shade of the frock Olga wore so well. "I believe she's a friend of Hellgren's," he replied.

"Who's Hellgren?"

"The sculptor!" said Grover.

Floss had broken up the group near the piano and

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 was bringing the Italian singer to meet Mignon Mangini. Guests were seeking comfortable seats in anticipation of uncomfortable music. Grover departed for an obscure corner. His second drink had found its mark, and he was now solacing himself with rich visions. The girl in nasturtium velvet might be beyond his reach, but even if he never spoke to her again she would remain as a symbolic summit in his career. He saw himself as an old man of seventy, the Grover Thanet, still painting pictures which were too subtle for the stupid public. There has been a great disappointment in his life, onlookers were whispering; but he never speaks about it.

Olga had tucked herself into one of the big sofas, and Peñaverde was telling her stories to which she responded with an occasional smile, the little folds on guard as ever.

Floss at length effected a hush. Mamie had bent one ankle and was working the muscles of her cheeks. This, Grover presumed, was to limber up her sinuses; he wasn't quite sure where her sinuses were, but he had heard Mamie talk about them, and about Emma Eames's. All he knew was that they resonated—like anything! The most professional touch of all was the spasmodic jerk by which Mamie locked her diaphragm, to ensure a reservoir of wind, and as she locked it her jaw became equally locked in an unearthly smile.

She had elected to try a Wagner aria on Signor Tamponi. As Grover listened, all he could think of

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 was a freight-train in motion. Pulling ont with slow, impressive, scraping puffs, gathering momentum until it was rattling heavily along, hoarsely shrieking as it approached the tunnel, rumbling sotto voce until it emerged into the light again, hurrying now toward the station, ascending grade and all, with a triumphant howl fortissimo, and at length pulling up with a long grinding hiss diminuendo. And if the train got switched on a wrong siding,—well, in modern opera it was the spirit that counted.

But Mamie's Ave Maria's, as she presently proved, were not essentially unlike her Ho-jo-to-ho's; the most noticeable difference was in the accompaniments. And some late callers that afternoon heard her screaming, d'après Victor Hugo and Reynaldo Hahn, that if her verses had wings they would fly night and day, which was easy to believe, but fearsome to contemplate.

The phenomenon was not that Mamie sang badly, that she sang even abominably; the phenomenon was that the people who heard her thought she sang well. They even encouraged her to sing, as who should fervently pray, In the name of Art, crucify us. And after hearing their applause and their compliments, Grover was forced to conclude that, as singers went, perhaps Mignon Mangini wasn't one of the worst. Heaven knew the best were hard to find.

In the redistribution that took place after the music, Grover found himself shackled to Mamie again, in a corner of the room whence all but he had fled. She

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 had been twiddling the lapel of Signor Tamponi's coat, but that gentleman had departed, as had another gentleman whose fountain pen Mamie had coquettishly borrowed to write an address. The awful part of it was, he was beginning to feel sorry for Mamie.

"Where are we going to have dinner?" she asked.

Grover was unable to tell her. All he knew was that Floss had asked him to remain with a few others, apparently including Hellgren and Olga. Peñaverde and the Marchesa, too, showed no disposition to depart, and Floss had just ordered one of her Cossacks to bring cocktails for eight.

From the group at the fireplace a good-natured shout went up. Apparently the princess had said something affectionately ribald to her husband.

"Come on," Mamie ordered, and as they rose to join the others she slid a long arm over his shoulder, making her horrid little pushing sounds in his ear. Olga, who noticed him only at inopportune moments, on the promptings of some demon of alertness within her, glanced up just in time to see Mamie's proorietary gesture.

Floss's prince, who was a gourmet, had telephoned to an exclusive restaurant which resembled a smart little club. A garden sheltered it from the street, and within, the subdued lights and intimate proportions of the rooms gave one a sense of being far away from

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 the city, instead of in the heart of it. Around two tables which had been joined together, Floss gathered her flock. Grover found himself between Mamie Mangum and the Marchesa, who, to his relief, turned her back on him and addressed herself to the prince. On Mamie's left sat Oscar Hellgren, bubbling with heavy Swedish humor, and next to Hellgren Floss, under a sweeping hat of tautly stretched blue silk that gave the lie complete to Illinois, beamed with pride at being sandwiched between a successful sculptor and a successful painter. Armando Peñaverde, with his sleek, spare face, white teeth, and black hair, was behaving towards his other neighbor, Olga, in a manner which Grover could characterize only as exceedingly Spanish. For two hours on end he had been saying witty things to her in a low voice, but from all that one could detect in Olga's candid yet sphinx-like face, he had made no appreciable headway. Now and again Olga would laugh freely enough at Peñaverde's sallies, whatever they were; but whenever they overshot the mark she would counter with a sharp riposte, always on her guard, always in complete control of herself. In the main she seemed unwillingly interested in the Spaniard. She's cold, thought Grover, and hard; but for the man who could succeed in warming and softening her!

The prince and the Marchesa were talking horses, a subject on which Grover's information was infinity, plus or minus, since,—and that was the only pictur-

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 esque fact in all Algebra and you had to do problems for four years to get to it,—they were equal.

Although the good American cocktails had brought him out of his gloom and he was chatting glibly enough with Mamie, his mind was on anything but her ships and shoes and sealing-wax, her impressions of current plays and operas and singers, It was largely on the speculative ocean of what lay behind the pressed-in glints in the eyes of the girl in nasturtium velvet, and behind the broad, pressed-in smile on her odd white face. He could no more keep his mind off her than in a theatre he could keep his eyes off the stage, no matter what detracting things he might tell himself about the piece and the performance. Moreover he knew he would leave her presence with a similar sense of the dullness and drabness of the outside world.

If Olga weighed Sweden and Spain in the balance and found each a little wanting, as Grover dared to guess, how would she react to America? Of her reaction to Mamie Mangum she had made no secret: she had looked around once, in reply to an inane inquiry in Mamie's most foreign French, said "Parfaitement, Mademoiselle," looked slowly past her, around the circle and back to the Spaniard, and both she and Mamie knew that there was not another inch of common ground for them on the face of the earth. Her reaction to her American hostess, on the other hand, was warm and crisp. Floss had leaned across Don

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 Armando and said to Olga, "I wish I knew you well enough to ask where you got that pretty hat."

To which Olga, with a laugh and a gesture of placing herself at Floss's entire disposition, a gesture Mamie would have given an eye tooth to have been born with,—had replied, "It's I who made it, Madame, and if you would really like to know me better, let me come and make you one . . . only ever so slightly different!" she candidly supplemented, with a wry smile, and both Floss and Olga looked out upon acres of common ground.

And when Grover, delighted with this give and take, his eyes fixed on the silhouette of Olga's smart black hat against the greenish sky that showed through the high window behind her, had rapidly cut in, "One would say, Mademoiselle, that you even made the holly tree out there as well, for when you hold your head like that it makes a perfect pom-pom on the brim," she had looked at him coolly, and retorted, "I suppose you think, because you once bought me a pair of stockings, that you know me well enough to say any foolishness?"

"I wish I did," said Grover. "There are so many millions of nice foolishnesses to say."

"What's this about stockings?" inquired Floss, her blue eyes as big as saucers, and a half eaten caviare tartine poised in the air.

Grover was obliged, to his embarrassment, to tell the story, which seemed to give them all an immoderate amount of amusement, especially when Olga capped it

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 by saying, to the company, "You have no idea how sweet and shy he was!"

This was more depressing to Grover than if she had been scornful. Why, he was furiously wondering, does every woman treat me as a minor!

The situation was just beginning to penetrate into the massive skull of the Swede. Over his heaped-up plate he leaned forward to look at Grover, apparently seeing him for the first time that day.

"So you are the young man we met on the sidewalk the night of the masquerade!"

Worse and worse, thought Grover, now thoroughly ill at ease. To him it seemed as though his most romantic secrets were being made public property and thereby forever damaged.

Olga rescued him from the necessity of relating the sequel to the torn stocking episode by remarking, with a narquoise implication, "He was with a very pretty blond girl."

"Grover Thanet!" exclaimed Floss. "The things I don't know about you! and never even suspected. Who was she?"

"Oh!" laughed Grover, now on his guard, "That was Marthe Lamielle," as who should say, that was Marthe Régnier, or Mary Garden, or Mistinguett. He had heard other people toss off a totally unknown name as though everybody would know who was meant, and he now had the satisfaction of seeing the expedient

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 work, for Floss said "Oh!" and went on with her second tartine.

Poor little Marthe, thought Grover. What pain it would cause her to see him in this rich setting, within such an intimate distance of the girl who was so unmistakably his "type."

Wine had been poured and for the next hour the dinner grew toward an amalgamation of hilarities, Grover remained silent through most of it, except to laugh automatically with the rest, while the wine and the music pursued each other through his veins till he scarcely knew which was which. It was subdued American jazz, a kaleidoscope which caught up the soft sheen of the evening sky through the open windows, the earthy scent from the hedges suggestive of early spring, the agreeable appearance and flavor of nameless dishes, the colors of lights and gowns, all of which seemed to shade up to, or away from, nasturtium.

Floss was singing the words and beating time with a friendly smile over her shoulder to the violinist in the balcony.

"I want to dance," she suddenly announced.

The prince was a little shocked. In this temple where food was a cult and not a mere excuse for exercise, dancing was unheard of.

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 "I don't care," said Floss, "I want to dance."

"Do ask him," urged the Marchesa, grasping at this opportunity to get back her Spaniard.

The prince had no choice but to summon the proptietor and make the request, which was obligingly granted.

"The floor has a heavy carpet," said the prince by way of final discouragement.

"I could dance on a wavy ocean tonight," declared Floss. "I'm feeling grand. All I need is a young and handsome partner. Come on, Grover. If they don't like it," she added, indicating the few strangers present, "they can go home. What do we care!"

The extra tables had been pushed back and the musicians took a new lease of life. The prince, gracefully accepting the inevitable, invited the Marchesa to dance, and in a moment only Mamie and Oscar Hellgren were left at the table. Mamie had got on terms with the sculptor and as she listened to his long cumbersome anecdotes she kept tying herself up in acrobatic knots in the hope, Grover guessed, that Hellgren would be filled with a desire to imprison her undulations, if not her voice and the ravelled gold embroidery, in marble.

"Whew!" exclaimed Floss, coming back to the table with renewed appetite. "Let's have some champagne."

When the music recommenced, Grover caught the eyes of Olga. Was it accidental, he wondered, or were the lids pressing out of sight a tiny glint of challenge?

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 He asked her to dance, and Peñaverde darted a swift, Spanish glance in his direction. Go on back to Spain! Grover muttered to himself and caught Olga looking toward Hellgren, who seemed always to be mechanically conscious of her and as mechanically dependent on her as he was dependent on his garments. He half nodded to her as though authorizing her to amuse herself, and went on talking in a sluggish stream of Swedish French which was punctuated by the muffled, pushing sounds of Mamie's intense and eloquent nose.

Olga's smile, as she rose to join Grover, took the edge off the distasteful sign of submission to Hellgren's good pleasure.

The tune was of a bygone vintage,—he had danced with Rhoda to the self-same rhythms,—but exhilarating. After a few tentative measures Olga adapted her steps to his. The contact of her slim, strong body, and the fact of yielding, in unison with her, to the dictates of the music, precipitated into a solid the tantalizing sensuous delights that had been suspended in solution all evening. And he danced with beating heart, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of clouding the solution again. Something that had been bottled up in him for years seemed to have become uncorked; through his veins the contents were being poured with divine extravagance and divinely intoxicating effect.

When the music ceased they came to a halt just under the balcony. Without looking at each other they continued to hold hands. Grover felt in his waistcoat

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 pocket. There was a note there for an amount he didn't dare stop to calculate. Holding it up to the smiling violinist, he said, "Play it all over again, will you, without any cuts."

And still avoiding her eyes, he slid back into motion. Her hat brushed his cheek, and though it was only a structure of wire and silk the effect was electrical. He leaned closer and their cheeks touched, until he trembled and drew away. They had not spoken a word since he had asked her to dance. Although they were dancing in a public room among their friends, he had an overwhelming feeling that it was all illicit, and that gave a sharp tang to the moment.

Again the music came to an end, and their eyes met as they stood still. "Grands dieux!" he whispered, awed by the discovery, "Je vous aime!"

The fingers of which he was still possessed, pressed for a moment around his own, while the baffling lids and puckered lips made a concerted effort to deny the encouragement he read into the blue light in the narrowed gray eyes. Then the fingers relaxed, and the hand went lightly to his arm.

"Don't say foolish things," she replied and turned gaily toward the table where the others were noisily settling into their places.

He sat back in a tumult, alternately laved in soft waves upon which he abandoned himself with a deep sigh of yearning, only to be thrown high and dry on hard ribbed sands of dread, over which his feelings

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 trickled away as though drawn by the whole irresistible trend of opposing fact.

When it was time to go, it was decided to dance once more, and he invited Floss. Just then she loomed before him as the only friend he possessed in the world.

"Well, honey, what kind of a time you been having?" she asked.

Again some bottle inside him poured its warm contents through his being. "It's been a mixed time," he confided, holding her more intimately near him. "A terrible mixed sort of time."

"Mixed, honey? Tell Flossie."

"Oh, it's not for telling. I only need a little sympathy. Could I come and see you tomorrow?" he asked, forming a swift resolution.

She had to think in the morning she was going to shop, but he could go with her.

She drew back to look at him more closely. "You're not in love or anything, are you?"

"Yes, with you!" he laughed.

"God love him," she said, and gave him a hug.

When he walked through the open doorway of Floss's palace next morning the first person he encountered was the girl whose image had tinged and flavored the March morning,—a morning on which all Paris seemed swept and garnished in the hope of a visit from spring.

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 She was leaning forward, so that the trim lines of her straight green coat were for the moment off their guard. The coat, for all its trimness, had a neglige appearance. The little black hat swept over the cheek in a circle that left a glimpse of nose and ear. One white-gloved hand rested on her breast; the other, from which hung a silver bag, was caressing Floss's absurd, microscopic dog, a griffon belge named Miette,—Mi for short. Mi, crowded back into a corner of a throne-like chair, was sturdily resisting Olga's advances; was even uttering vainglorious threats through her fierce little whiskers.

Before Olga had noticed his entrance the princess appeared on the staircase, manicured, massaged, and pinched into a radiant glow.

"Well here we all are," she called out, coming rather carefully down the stairs, "drunk, dressed, and highly perfumed. How do I look, honey?"

"Grand!" said Grover.

"About ten years younger, don't I?" she asked.

"Than what?"

"Than what my passport says I am."

"It lies," Grover reassured her.

Floss rumpled his hair gratefully, and gave Olga a kiss.

Olga had greeted him as coolly as when she had entered the house yesterday, and he had an instant of disappointment. After all, there was nothing so unusual about her! Then, in reply to some compliment

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 of Floss's she smiled in the peculiar manner that so stamped, yet so failed to reveal her individuality, and he heard, bubbling up within him, all the unwonted endearing words that had been confided to his pillow late last night, and early this morning.

Floss went to give orders and get information from the Cossacks, and presently called for him to bring a pencil. She had more items to add to her shopping list. When he came back Olga was examining her appearance in a tall mirror, with satisfaction but without vanity.

"It couldn't be improved," he assured her, timidly.

"Oh si!" she laconically contradicted. "A little touch of powder," and she proceeded to apply it, without, so far as Grover could detect, altering the ivory smoothness by the least appreciable degree.

Compliments, he reflected, were lost on her. In the manner of other Frenchwomen he had observed, she had long since assessed herself at a certain value, neither too great nor too small, and quite simply abided by it.

He was wondering what to say next when Floss returned and they went out to the car.

Grover had come with a vague intention of talking to Floss, even of confessing and asking counsel. Free as she was from amorous complications and yearnings of her own, Floss took enormous interest in the complications and yearnings of others, and at times was uncannily perspicacious. It was even possible that she

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 had guessed his secret and that Olga's presence was less accidental than it seemed. Floss's patriotism alone might lead her to plot for him. At any rate if he had lost the opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk, he had gained an even more precious opportunity, and as he listened to Floss's weird and rapid polyglot chatter he felt that any confession he might make would be superfluous. Her instinct would serve him far better than any conspiracy he might induce her to enter.

It was pleasant to glide down the broad, sun-bathed stretch of the Champs Elysées seated between these two. Floss did most of the talking; Olga made quick replies. Grover's indolent function was to listen, and occasionally to replenish Floss's vocabulary.

They wandered from jewellers to dressmakers, from Caron's to Sherry's, from the theatres for tickets to Brentano's for American novels. They bought and had loaded into the car most of the articles on Floss's sprawling list and many articles that had been unforeseen. Everywhere the tradesmen made way, and came running up with chairs. For Olga and for Grover it was a continuous marvel,—the sensation of vicarious affluence gave them the first common ground they had had to walk on, on tip-toe, as it seemed to Grover. Secretly he made much of the ease with which Olga lived up to her role of companion. Poor Floss, for all the noble salutations she drew down on her gilded head, was only lumberingly alert to finesses of comportment that Olga could accomplish with the lifting of

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 a finger. And oh, how he needed to make these discoveries; how he needed to justify the irresistible drift of his emotions by finding excellencies in the dubious sister of the dubious Léon. And the proof of her quality was that she made no move that caused Floss a moment's discomfort. Mamie Mangum would have toyed with bead-bags or tried on hats, in the hope that heaven, via Floss, would vouchsafe her one: not Olga; she was simply helping Floss come to decisions which to anyone but Floss would have been obvious.

"You let them see how badly you wanted that fur!" Olga reproved, as they emerged from one shop. "I could have got it for you for two thousand francs less."

Floss's radiance remained unclouded. Her face seemed to be saying, Well, what on earth could I have done with an extra two thousand francs? To which Olga's eyes replied, Mon Dieu, what it costs to be rich! and Grover reflected, Richesse oblige.

"Now," cried Floss, "to find Paul. Allons enfants de la patrie!"

"Quoique le jour de gloire ne soit pas arrivé!" supplemented Olga, and Grover adored her for the ironical implications. So much could be read into it by an imagination as busy as his own.

The prince, waxed and pommaded, was taking his apéritif at Fouquet's.

"Just one sip of mother's ruin," said Floss, getting out of the car, "and then we'll have lunch."

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 "Where's our good and honest Hellgren?" asked the prince, when they were seated.

"He's making a horse out of plaster," Olga told him.

"A beautiful horse?" inquired the prince, with a twinkle.

"A big one."

"He has a gigantic talent," the prince agreed, and left it at that.

They had lunch in another quiet restaurant of the gourmet's choosing. "One would say we were a nice little family," he remarked, looking about him in contentment. "Papa, Maman, and their son who has just finished his militaire and the daughter—"

"Whom they can't seem to marry off," broke in Olga with a blithe ripple of laughter that jarred. Grover's eyes were on Floss who had flinched slightly at her husband's fun. Aha! thought Grover, Floss's tragedy,—and he had always suspected the presence of a tragedy,—had something to do with children, or the lack of them.

"A nice young man," she was saying, to conceal any hurt that might have peered through her beaming mask, "told me only this morning that I didn't look more than thirty, so how could they be my children!"

The prince patted her hand with punctilious affection. "It's true!" he agreed. "It's I who am the grandfather of the lot of you. . . No compliments, Mademoiselle!" he added with a hand raised in warn-

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 ing as he saw one leaping to Olga's tongue. "Restons là."

"Peñaverde has made me look so thin you won't recognize me," said Floss. "After lunch I'll take you all to see the portrait."

"Bon!" said the prince. "What do you think of him, Mademoiselle—you who frequent the arts."

"I only frequent the ateliers," said Olga. "I have no opinions on what they paint in them."

"Raison de plus!" insisted the prince.

"They say his work is very subtle," Olga parried, "but that it concedes too much to caricature. It's supposed to be a Spanish tendency; I don't know. Asa man he annoys me; there's something sinister about him."

Grover glowed. It was more than a relief to know that she resented the Spaniard. His satisfaction with that made him slipshod in his heed of the tone in which she spoke, of the activity of the little folds about her eyes.

The prince was of the opinion that, if anything, the painter failed to allow his subtlety free enough scope. "He would do better work," he declared, "if he broke away from portraiture for a while. It's too easy for him to make money in Paris."

Grover was beginning to see hidden merits in Floss's anomalous husband who had cut off his moustache for a thin girl at the Marigny.

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 Floss, for her part, was more than satisfied with Peñaverde.

Grover was silent. He did not remember having seen any examples of the man's work, though the name still echoed in his brain with an unaccountable familiarity.

When they arrived at Peñaverde's studio in a fashionable street not far from the Etoile, the painter was dazzlingly pleasant. He answered the knock himself, and in his stained smock, with his black eyes and white teeth, he was menacingly pictorial. All the more so for a background of deep rich reds and purples and bronzes, pale blues and greens picked out by the strong white sunlight which streamed in through the glass wall. To Grover he seemed pleased to see Floss per se, but excessively happy to see her per Olga. Nothing definite in his attitude warranted this conclusion, but Grover was sure of it, even when he had made a fair discount on the score of his own hypersensitiveness to everything that concerned Olga. He watched her anxiously for some sign of the resentment she had professed, and was glad to note that she met each of the painter's attentions with an ironic counter. But then, desolating thought, hadn't she treated him, Grover Thanet, ever since their first encounter in Noémi Janvier's flat, either with indifference or with faint irony!

"How did you chance to wear a lettuce-colored coat today, Mademoiselle?" Don Armando asked, "when

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 that happens to be just the shade needed to relieve my deep colors here."

Olga's answer rang with truthfulness, but the little folds sent it off at a characteristic slant. "I wore it, Monsieur, A, because it was cold; B, because it's the only coat I possess."

Grover felt that if he had been a girl he would have bristled even more than Olga had bristled under the Spaniard's ingratiations. It wasn't so much the barbarously caricatured nude studies that one had caught sight of, in a half fallen stack against the table. It was something in the tail of Don Armando's eye: an uncomfortable trick of letting his glance linger a second after his smile had died down. Grover had a similar distrust in watching the movements of his hands. The fingers dragged a moment before relinquishing whatever object they had been holding.

They were admiring the portrait of Floss, and Grover was struck by the superlative skill with which the painter had, on some happy impulse,—possibly with a thought for the price he was going to charge for it,—singled out and delineated all the obviously likable features in his subject. True, he had pruned Floss, sheared off excrescences that made her verge on the blowsy, carelessly given her (Grover counted them in amazement but held his peace) only three fingers and a thumb on one hand, and had made her more elegantly slender than Floss in her most ambitious flights had ever dreamed of being. But this

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 had been corrected by a characteristic attitude, and the whole absurdly beautiful effect was saved from any element of pretentiousness by the generous, frank, half tender, half vulgar smile that illuminated the features.

Grover congratulated Floss and the painter. The latter turned to Olga with a curious smile. "I suspect you of not liking it," he said.

"You are right, Monsieur."

"May one ask why?"

"Because you have painted the princess that all Paris knows,—the princess whom all the newspapers celebrate. At the Grand Salon Paris will recognize her and crow with delight. But if I had been the painter I would have painted the real princess or nothing. I would have put in less silk and gaiety and more of the good heart and good judgment that in real life make that particular smile possible. All you've done, the beauty shops and dressmakers could have done."

This intrepid girl, laconically putting her finger on what they all had failed to formulate!

Peñaverde was laughing blandly. "Et vous, Monsieur?" he inquired of the prince.

"I think it very clever. It's bound to make a sensation in Chicago!"

Another score, reflected Grover in triumph.

"Show us some more pictures," Floss was saying, a little disturbed by something they were all leaving unsaid.

Don Armando subtly made it apparent that he was

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 not in the habit of displaying his wares before callers, but it seemed equally clear, at least to Grover, that Olga had put him on his mettle.

The canvasses he brought out for their inspection were of an undeniably high quality. If Grover had been rich enough, he would have been tempted by some of these wickedly funny old women and ungainly men, vagabonds and sinners, horrendously nude. They grew on him as drawing after drawing was placed on the easel. After the first shock of resentment at the making light of things which, if not exactly sacred, should at least have been private, one subscribed with gusto to the skilfully emphasized incongruities, the wounding humor. They furnished the sort of enjoyment one derived from the brutal pranks recounted in old Spanish stories like the Lazarillo de Tormes. They had the beauty of gargoyles, combined with an awesome veracity.

Peñaverde took his guests to a smaller room, against the walls of which were turned numerous canvasses of all sizes. "These are old things," he said, "done in my salad days. Sometimes I think they are the best of all."

His running commentaries were directed chiefly toward Olga.

"Oh!" cried Floss, picking up a neglected portrait and holding it to the light. "That's sweet! Who is she?"

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 which picture Floss had pounced on with such rapture. "I like that one too," he agreed.

"But who is it?" Floss insisted. "I'm sure I've seen her."

Peñaverde shrugged his shoulders, and turned toward the other canvasses.

"Who should it be?" he said. "A lady who once came for tea—and stayed for breakfast."

"You sinner!" laughed Floss and held up the painting for the others to see.

With a little rush of recognition which seemed, strangely, to come froma pent-up source, Grover shouted, "It's not true!"

They looked at him in consternation. Peñaverde alone still pleasantly smiled.

"I beg your pardon," Grover apologized. "I was taken by surprise. I know the woman."

It was only the hasty rudeness he regretted, not the essential contradiction. For all he could prove to the contrary that wistfully smiling girl portrayed in a muslin frock with a great bouquet of daisies on her lap had stayed for breakfast. But even if she had,—and the thought was so repellent as to make him feel sick,—Peñaverde had absolutely no right to dispose of her, privately, much less publicly, with a caddish remark and a cynical shrug, for the girl was not the sort of girl who made a practice of coming for tea and staying for breakfast. The girl was Sophie Scantleberry.

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 days Grover kept seeing the face of the Sophie he had known, the Sophie to whom he had read poems and talked amateur philosophy; the Sophie redolent of a sweet scent that baffled description; the Sophie he had loved and trusted and in the wonderment of awakening passion kissed. His instinctive antipathy toward Peñaverde and the resurrected pain had created an instantaneous desire to rescue her name from those lips, a desire to deny the possibility of this opportunist's easy assumption of rights in his own Sophie. For this man would no more have scrupled to abuse Sophie's confidence than he would, had there been enough to gain by it, have scrupled to make a wicked caricature of Floss. The unkind studies of those poor, defenceless old souls in his studio were evidence enough of his lack of conscience, if tangible evidence were needed.

Worst of all a doubt, never quite formulated in the past, kept growing in his mind. After the disastrous conclusion of his comradeship with Sophie something had retrospectively squinted a little, and he had idly wondered, vaguely suspected. And now this Armando—oh, Sophie, since it had to be unearthed, why should it have had to be this man, with his cold, glittering intensity, and his sinister after-glances! Et tu, Sophie, he said, like Caesar, were you a member of that worldwide league of people who play with cards up their sleeves! Which pillar next!

There was no doubting the truth of the Spaniard's

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 implication. A man for whom the truth supplied so many tempting sources of humor had nothing to gain by dealing in petty untruths. Everything pointed to it, including the portrait in the house in Commonwealth Avenue which had brought a shadow across their last interview.

And just behind the image of Sophie, waiting to crowd it out and obsess his imagination, was the image of Olga. He kept arguing that a girl who was no more unusual than Olga had no right to uproot him, to fill his thoughts till he had no appetite for work, no vitality, no enthusiasm. Standing before the easel in his bedroom he thought alternately of Peñaverde's wizardly skill and of Casimir's unfathomable depths of sincerity, and he threw down his palette.

For a reason he could scarcely formulate he avoided Floss's noisy house. Every afternoon he felt drawn there, yet the journey half way accomplished he would turn and walk in another direction—aimlessly and for hours. The prospect of meeting Olga in the company of idle, chattering, shiny or shabby groups of wasters to whom love was no more symbolic than a game of poker, deterred him. Something vital, he recognized, had overtaken him. Perhaps the It that he had been half expecting for years. If he had only known how devastating to one's peace of mind this particular kind of exaltation could prove to be, he might have braced himself for it. But it was too late now; he was in the grip of a force as exhilarating, and as deadly, as the

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 shiny white powder that was so popular in the circles he had lately been frequenting.

His love, if he could call it by that name,—and it was not at all the sort of thing one might have expected it to be,—blinded and paralyzed him. It pursued its dynamic course despite the most cogent obstacles one could raise in its path. Love makes fools sublime, he reflected, but by the same token reduces the intelligent to a state of imbecility.

The feature of the experience that made it most difficult to manage was the fact that love wove a magic cloak about the object of one's desires, lending it a strange and irresistible beauty. And whoever had said that a thing of beauty was a joy forever was an idiot, thought Grover,—unless by "joy" he meant excruciatingly pleasant apprehension of the object. It is tragic as well as grotesque, he reflected, that the thing which, once a year or so, reveals you to yourself in all your defenceless nudity is the tilt of some little nobody's nose. Being in love didn't at all blind him to the fact that Olga was a little nobody, for his mind and his heart were as independent of each other as ever. It simply blinded him to what was practical and feasible; on the other hand it gave extraordinary acuity to his imaginative sight: rendered it possible for him to see himself with dazzling distinctness on a faraway island with a glorified sister of Léon Vaudreuil forever at his side—or even nearer.

The tilt of a nose, his thoughts roamed on, not only

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 reveals you to yourself, but drives you back again ruthlessly into yourself, where you know you belong but where you dread having to stay, eternally and eternally,—especially, just as you had begun to learn the technique of being objective. If there were only some one to tell you what life was all about. But there was nobody. Even the Geoffrey Saints had strict limitations. You had to find out for yourself, and it was like a frog climbing out of a well: for every inch forward, a slip backward, into the same old perplexities, forever and forever. His state of mind was not unlike that of a man who has hidden a twenty dollar bill for safe keeping. Needing it in an emergency he looks in the same old pitchers, and it's probably right there on a shelf, yet he can't for the life of him find it, and all he knows is that he's worth twenty dollars. All Grover knew for sure was that he was a man of balance, but where his damn equilibrium had gone, God alone could tell.

It's unfortunate, he was thinking, to be the sort of man whose depths can be stirred by the color of somebody's hair. For being stirred by the color of somebody's hair is like building on shifting sands, and it means that a good part of one's life is devoted to re-building,—with diminishing faith in the worth of the effort. Diminishing faith, but thank heaven—and it was little enough by way of compensation,—increasing dexterity. He gloomily supposed that a wise man ended by devising a sort of cheap portable house that

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 could be put up overnight to serve till the next tide swept in, and no great harm done.

Being in love was analogous to having malaria, Each recurrence would be somewhat less virulent; but each recurrence would leave you weaker than the last. Up to the time of Olga's advent, he had recovered from each attack with fair rapidity. As soon as the first symptom had appeared he had been in the habit of dosing heavily with logical formulae bequeathed to a weak-minded posterity by the Professor Thanet, and usually he had been through with the disease before it had been through with him. There was a question in his mind, however, as to whether it was worse to suffer from the disease than from the excessive preventions,—too much logic could be paralyzing. His friends and critics averred that he didn't fling himself into life hard enough, that he hadn't learned to lose his soul in order to find it. Well, this time they couldn't cavil. This time his preventions were having no curative effect whatever. The fever was raging as never before. The more he told himself that Olga was an ordinary little nobody, the more he saw her swathed in a magic cloak.

His efforts to paint were more sporadic than ever. To stand before his easel and wrestle with an angel who was positively devilish was a futile attitude, and he resorted to books. Long since released from academic trammels he was creeping back mentally into kennels that had once promised but austere hospitality.

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 Bergson, after many polite but chilling encounters, had thrown him a bone to knaw at, and working through to its marrow he made astonishing discoveries about time and space. If the philosophers would only refrain from calling quite simple things by dreadful big names, he reflected, knowledge would be less elusive. He was learning that Bergson championed the existence of a free spirit against the attacks of those who insisted on a mechanical universe; and if the writers of philosophical handbooks had only been frank enough to say so, instead of saying that Bergson was the high priest of the critico-epistemological idealism, life at college would have been one degree less difficult. He now understood Rhoda's impatience at his "five-syllable views of life."

From hours of mental struggle with the theories of creative evolution he would walk far across the city to hours in Marthe's cafe. The fact that he was under a cloud, that his being was in the grip of uncontrollable forces, that his emotions were flowing away from him and bearing his soul on the tide, though never admitted by him, was not unknown to Marthe. She was not the woman to accuse him of being in love with another; but she was the woman to sense it, to suffer from the knowledge, yet to mask her suffering. In a devious way it increased their extraordinary, tacit friendship. It was as though at last, because each was being drastically taxed by life, there was a common ground upon which they could meet. They came to the cafe with

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 little presents for each other: for Marthe a vanity case, a handkerchief, a bottle of perfume; for him cigarettes, a matchbox, a diverting toy. They sat and talked about their neighbors, about the trifling incidents of their own days, while Marthe nervously broke matches or tore little squares of paper in a heap on the table. Then often, without preparation, they were at the very heart of life, oddly in agreement about the true, the good, and the beautiful.

"There are only two kinds of people," said Marthe one evening, and Grover again marvelled at the directness of her sources of knowledge, "those who are honest and those who are not. The honest build; the others demolish. Both are necessary, for you can't have a Yes unless there is a No to prove it by. The strong people are those who are either utterly honest to the end, or utterly dishonest to the end. Honest people who stoop to dishonesty under pressure of circumstances, or dishonest people who can be cowed into honesty are the weaklings of the earth. To be honest is a career in itself; it's easy enough to tell the truth once you know it, but how many know it apropos of anything? If you are honest with yourself, life holds no terrors; if you lie to yourself you're doomed. What makes life such a burden for people like you and me is that we find so little echo in the world about us to the verities that ring so clearly within us. Only lies, or flippancies come back to us, and there's no

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 rhyme, and we sink under the weight of unconfirmed truths."

"But salvation is possible," argued Grover. "For if you're honest with yourself you'll gradually come to recognize the true from the spurious, what to hold and what to reject, and from experience you will learn how to dominate your life, and thence, in some degree, life itself, and your surroundings and your would-be destroyers. Circumstances which were your rulers, you then use as your instruments."

Marthe gave him a smile, half tender, half bitter. "Yes, you can," she said, "because you are persistent, because you are strong enough to wait. Men can reclaim their bogs; women sink into them."

"But women have always leaned on a man's strength."

"The poor fools! Men, even the best of men, don't protect women; at most they protect their own rights in one woman. . . But one can't blame them. If a woman cries for help and the man stretches out his arm, she pulls him into her bog, sometimes without meaning to, sometimes deliberately. They're a heavy load."

"But what about the strong women who make great sacrifices for love?"

"They are strong as men are—selfishly. They make sacrifices because it's the only way to preserve the treasure in their heart. If they did not make the sacrifice the treasure would escape them, or lose its value.

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 All strength is selfish. It differs from weakness only in being a wiser and more far-sighted kind of selfishness. The weak are weak because they don't understand; they are like children who think an orange is bigger than the moon."

"But you are strong, Marthe," Grover ventured, "yet your life, at least on the surface, resembles the life of all the weak girls who ever lived."

She broke into her gay rabelaisian laugh, a laugh that always touched Grover because far beneath it he saw a well of despair. "I know that the moon is bigger than an orange, and far more important. I know it would be wise to reject the orange and reach up toward the heavens. But unfortunately I like oranges; I like the taste and color and feel of them. The moon is so remote, and I am so impatient. If I have a soul, it's asleep, and my body's wide awake. . . You are different. You spend half your time in the moon. Haven't I often told you so?"

"It's a dreary planet," said Grover.

"It sheds a lovely light."

The voice of the woman at the caisse had risen to a sharp pitch above the buzz of chatter about them. She was scolding a bedraggled youth who had just attempted to swagger out of the cafe. "Haven't I told you you couldn't have credit for another sou till you paid what you owe?" she was crying.

"Allo!" Marthe called out. "René!" and the harassed youth advanced hopefully.

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 "Tenez!" said Marthe, fishing in her bag for a twenty-franc note. "Prends!"

Grover noticed the weakness of the boy's wrist under the frayed sleeve. He had no need to ask Marthe why she had thrown away a sum which she could ill spare; he himself had too often done the same sort of thing.

"He has nothing," said Marthe, without a trace of condemnation, "not even an overcoat. And he never will have anything. He is as useless as any weed on the side of the road."

"Yet," said Grover cynically, complementing her thought, "he shares the bay tree's great privilege of existence."

"Oh, as to that," said Marthe, "there's something grand about a field of weeds; it's the totality that's inspiring."

As Grover made his way home that evening he pondered the truth of Marthe's observation. How often, in moments of depression and bewilderment, in moments when his own hopes seemed as futile as the aims of a grasshopper, had he not been saved by some sudden panorama of the stupendous totality of human endeavor. Even the most baneful weed could claim a legitimate share in the purpose of creation, for the weed, like the proudest cedar of Lebanon, drew strength and color from the same earth, aspired toward the same sun, died in the same patriotic cause, disintegrated quite as sublimely into the same chemicals, thereby providing nourishment for future expressions

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 of the grand creative impulse. In its own measure the weed had a soul, however mean and wayward, and its attempt to survive, its attempt to get drinks and cocaine on money borrowed from a prostitute was, if not so noble as the struggle of a Goethe to put verities on the tongue of his Faust, at least as undeniably a part of the great élan. We poor foolish mortals are unhappy, Grover reflected, because we won't face: the most apparent fact in all the world, which is that the woes or the joys of one individual are as nothing in the solar scheme. If we could for once stand far enough aloof from ourselves to catch a glimpse of the colossal wear and tear of creation, we would understand the grandeur of contributing even an infinitesimal quota; we would be filled with a zest for life that would override grief, decay, and death itself. He felt, as he walked through the blatant, garish boulevards, as though he were part of the rich soil of humanity,—a soil which drank in the rain, the sunshine, the nitres in the air, a putrid soil in which seeds were germinating, and the seeds would sprout and grow into a crop; the crop would perhaps feed the starving, perhaps lie neglected in the field to rot and provide nourishment for future crops. Whether the crop should prove utilizable or not was of little consequence; what was of consequence was the deep awareness of fertility, the knowledge that one was being used, however ruthlessly, in however small degree, by the colossal forces of creation.

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 One might paint the worst pictures even seen; one might languish unto death for love of the most accidental girl in one's path; one might eat a bad oyster and die, or live a century in the enjoyment of a busy progency,—and it didn't make a particle of difference, provided one made an honest attempt to be productive. Dishonesty and infertility obstructed the course of the spheres; in conjunction they constituted the unpardonable sin.

The elation which these thoughts brought him proved to be but an anaesthetic; when he awoke next morning, into a minute division of the cosmos adorned with faded silk and dusty stucco, the petty, insistent pangs were on him again,—pangs which the sight and presence of only one of God's many minions could effectually soothe.

He was weary of trying to live down his passion, Today, he resolved, I will cease fighting it.

Much as he disliked the approach to Olga through Floss's refuge for lost souls, much as he repudiated the thought of poaching on Oscar Hellgren's preserves, much as he disliked the whole flavor of the intrigue before him, Grover's resolution held firm. If you are honest with yourself, he amended Marthe's dictum, you can justify yourself in any course of procedure short of murdering your defenceless grandmother. To be honest with himself was to admit that Olga was a

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 necessity; if she was a necessity to the sculptor, that was the sculptor's affair; let the Swede protect his rights as best he might. Unhappily the assault would have to be wary; but there was nothing in the code of the higher honesty that obliged you to refrain from telling or acting a lie before the world, when to do so was strictly a matter of self-preservation.

When he came into the tiny grande pièce he found Mme. Choiseul heaving and exclaiming over a brand new crime. A taxicab driver had robbed, raped, and fusilladed a young woman who had asked to be driven to the house of her mother; a scavenger had found her remains on the roadside. There's worse than me, thought Grover.

Madame's engrossment in this horror was blighted by the incorrigible breakfast milk, which was boiling over with the usual sardonic hiss. With the usual squawk of dismay she heaved herself out toward the kitchen, making commendable time in view of her years and her chronic acidity.

Grover picked up the paper she had relinquished, and as though the colossal forces of creation were condescending to him in acknowledgment of the honor he had done them the previous evening, they directed his attention to the columns reserved for mention of the arts. The public were invited to an exhibition of the sculptor Hellgren which included a model of the war monument recently commissioned by the city of Bordeaux.

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 On this first day of the show, Hellgren himself might be present, and if so, one thing might lead to another—or be made to lead. In any case the exhibition rooms would serve as a reconnoitring ground.

The show was under the auspices of a dealer in the rue la Boétie, and when Grover arrived there, late in the afternoon, he found only a few visitors. Fashionable patrons of the arts, he supposed, had attended the private showing.

Inan inner room, before the model of the monument, Hellgren himself stood, his bulk almost blotting from Grover's view the miniature forms of the "horses and tanks and everything," as Floss had described the Swede's heroic composition. With flourishes of his fat arms he was elucidating its allegories to a tall, slinking woman who, if Grover could believe his eyes, was Mignon Mangini of Idaho Falls.

It was disconcerting to find Mamie here, doubtless following up her advantage with the one man who had ever been seen to respond for more than five minutes at a stretch to her dogged undulations. In the same mystic tone in which she had once, her eyes half closed, told Grover that she was a fervent devotee of the Upanishads, of which he didn't believe her capable of quoting a single precept, she was now, as he approached the pair, murmuring her response to the ecstatic gesture of the wounded poilu at the head of the forlorn parade. "I know just what you meant," she said. "The victory of the Idea, the triumph of faith."

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 As a matter of fact for once it was conceivable that Mamie knew what she was talking about, for, Grover reflected, if anybody had ever kept an idealistic banner aloft under terrific fire, it was the lanky self-made soprano who was,—there was no doubt of it,—"getting to sing in opera."

Hellgren seemed almost not to recognize him, but when Mamie greeted Grover by name, recognition dawned, and the sculptor pumped his arm with grateful pleasure. Grover was sorry for Hellgren in advance, sorry for him in principle, and at the same time half envious of such simple guilelessness. Mamie had twisted herself into an attitude which was meant to express embarrassment at being discovered in a situation which she hoped would be construed as clandestine. And Grover's compassion for Hellgren spread out and included in its embrace the would-be guileful Mamie,—poor Mamie who had to go to such lengths for a thrill which wasn't even a true one. And at heart so desperately harmless.

"I only saw the announcement of your show this morning," Grover explained. "I've wanted for a long while to see some of your things." It was the first shot in his campaign of perfidy. The second cost him an even sharper qualm, and anybody but Hellgren and Mamie, he felt sure, would have twigged. "This small model, of course, gives one a very inadequate idea; how far have you progressed on the finished piece?"

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 Hellgren rose at once to the bait. "Pas mal! pas mal! You must come one day and see it."

"That would give me great pleasure," said Grover.

"Tiens!" cried the sculptor, seized with a happy thought, "Come this very afternoon. I was on the point of leaving when Mlle. Mangini came in. Let's have tea there, all three?"

Mamie's expression was calculated to let him see that Hellgren, the soul of tact, finesse, and chivalry, was inviting him into their clandestinities merely for the sake of her reputation.

Grover was a little unprepared for the prompt success of his machinations, and as they darted across Paris in one of the mad vehicles that seemed to bear a charmed life, Oscar's bulk taxing the springs to the utmost, he wondered if fate were playing her usual game: rainbow and bog.

Hellgren possessed the lease of an entire house, though a small one, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The income he was reputed to derive from iron mines in Lappland would account for the chaste marble entrance, the imported shrubberies in the court, the lovely old paintings and chests, a loveliness against which Hellgren appeared fantastic, but for which he alone was responsible. For all his bulk, Hellgren's taste was impeccable, though it ran to the massive and the mathematical, His popularity with the French, Grover reflected, had to do with his preoccupation with form. If Grover had been irritated by the angularities of the

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 statues he had just seen in the rue La Boétie, he had come away with a sincere admiration for the solidity of their structure, the harmony and equilibrium of their intricate planes.

This, thought Grover, is the house to which Olga was hurrying the day she tore her stocking. Hellgren was preceding Mamie and himself up a narrow stairway toward a balcony from which they looked down and up and around into the biggest atelier Grover had ever seen. The little house they had entered was as deceptive as a theatre, so small from the outside, so resoundingly big within. When Hellgren spoke, in his loud Swedish French, the walls took up his phrases and flung them back to the slender balcony. Before them were great figures in marble and plaster, encased in scaffoldings. Beside them Hellgren's assistants looked like flies. Thick white dust coated everything, including the windows which stretched from floor to ceiling and across half the roof.

Of Olga there was no sign, and for the next half hour, as he wandered with Mamie through this disciplined quarry, uttering half sincere, half obligatory comments, thinking that if he stayed here long enough he would feel himself a plinth supporting on his own head the incalculable tons of Hellgren's inspirations, Grover wondered where Olga was, whether she would come, whether he might have to continue this fatiguing campaign for weeks and weeks before it bore any sign of fruit.

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 Tea would help, he was thinking, half choked with the dust, and sick to death of Mamie's enthusiastic pushing sounds, when, without warning, there was a scamper of feet on the stairs, and an apparition on the balcony. Over the beautiful forged iron railing Olga was leaning, all smiles and capers, blowing kisses down to them,—Columbine returned. Harlequin on a creaking ladder. Moi, thought Grover, je suis le triste Pierrot.

She came running down into the studio, shook hands with Mamie and himself, then stepped up to kiss the sculptor who was restoring a damp cloth to a head of clay. She received Hellgren's caress with a frisk, and never had Grover watched tokens of domestic affection which he so abjectly failed to relish.

"Come down at once," Olga scolded, "and stop talking about your dreadful gravestones, or we'll have tea without you."

She took Mamie by the arm,—a most hospitable concession,—and Grover stood waiting for Hellgren to descend. Though the sculptor still abounded in theories, some of which he got off as they paused before figures blocking their progress, they eventually made their way up the stairs and into a small salon which was as French as the studio was Swedish.

Tucked into a chintz-covered chair which displayed a pattern of impressionistic grapes and apricots, pale shades which by contrast gave life to her own ivory, honey, and amethyst, and dressed in the simple fashion

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 in which he had first seen her, Olga seemed as much at home as Mme. Casimir among her gold-legged chairs. Touching a match to the samovar and ranging the cups, Olga, like Mme. Casimir, was presiding over the table of a man whose creations were strange and even hostile to her; but unlike Mme. Casimir, and markedly so, Olga conveyed the impression of having flitted into this room by chance. Though there were little signs of her residence about the salon, though she fitted beautifully enough into these buff and lavender and gray surroundings, though the rich corduroy sheen of her hair threw back familiar gleams to the mirror in which Mamie was trying to make herself look as little as possible like a woman from Idaho, it would not have seemed strange if Olga had, at an appropriate moment, got up, put on her béret, kissed Oscar nonchalantly on the nose, said to him, in the slang of the streets, "Adieu, je t'ai vu!" and frisked off—where? Oh, to the fancy dress ball that Life, to any sister of Léon Vaudreuil, must, when all was said and done, consist of.

"Thé? Ou bien autre chose!" she was asking him, with a cup held tentatively under the spiggot.

"Autre chose," he laughed.

She peered down to the lower shelf of the table, taking stock of the bottles. "There's cognac and Swedish punch and grand marnier and—"

"Let it be cognac, with a dash of curaçao," Grover decided.

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