"I think I'll take a nap," said he. With a languid smile and a little flaunt of his hand as if dismissing us, he moved languidly off, but stopped after a few steps to say to me: "We'll explore the castle to-morrow, Mr. Smart, if it's just the same to you." He spoke with a very slight accent and in a peculiarly attractive manner. There was charm to the man, I was bound to admit. "I know Schloss Rothhoefen very well. It is an old stamping ground of mine." "Indeed," said I, affecting surprise. "I spent a very joyous season here not so many years ago. Hohendahl is a bosom friend." When he was quite out of hearing, Billy Smith leaned over and said to me: "He spent his honeymoon here, old man. It was the girls' idea to bring him here to assuage the present with memories of the past. Quite a pretty sentiment, eh?" "It depends on how he spent it," I said significantly. Smith grinned approvingly. Being a diplomat he sensed my meaning at once. "It was a lot of money," he said. At dinner the Russian baron, who examined every particle of food he ate with great care and discrimination, evidently looking for poison, embarrassed me in the usual fashion by asking how I write my books, where I get my plots, and all the rest of the questions that have become so hatefully unanswerable, ending up by blandly enquiring _what_ I had written. This was made especially humiliating by the prefatory remark that he had lived in Washington for five years and had read everything that was worth reading. If Elsie had been a man I should have kicked her for further confounding me by mentioning the titles of all my books and saying that he surely must have read them, as everybody did, thereby supplying him with the chance to triumphantly say that he'd be hanged if he'd ever heard of any one of them. I shall always console myself with the joyful thought that I couldn't remember his infernal name and would now make it a point never to do so. Mr. Pless openly made love to Elsie and the Baron openly made love to Betty Billy. Being a sort of noncommittal bachelor, I ranged myself with the two abandoned husbands and we had quite a reckless time of it, talking with uninterrupted devilishness about the growth of American dentistry in European capitals, the way one has his nails manicured in Germany, the upset price of hot-house strawberries, the relative merit of French and English bulls, the continued progress of the weather and sundry other topics of similar piquancy. Elsie invited all of us to a welsh rarebit party she was giving at eleven-thirty, and then they got to work at the bridge table, poor George Hazzard cutting in occasionally. This left Billy Smith and me free to make up a somewhat somnolent two-some.