Grandam did not come down to dinner that night. But Mrs. Weyman said that she rarely did appear for two meals in the same day, even when she was feeling her best. Ariel suspected that Mrs. Weyman, in emphasizing this point, was indirectly intending to reassure her and make her feel that Grandam’s absence had nothing to do with her own visit uninvited to the attic apartment. They gathered in the library after dinner. Glenn and Ariel were at one end of the divan in front of the fire engaged in setting up the chessmen. Anne and Prescott Enderly were at the other end, waiting for Mrs. Nevin, who was taking them, that evening, to a dance at the house of friends of hers in Scarsdale. Mrs. Weyman occupied a low chair near by, and she was smoking an after-dinner cigarette. Enderly looked both handsome and distinguished in his evening clothes. “Much more the accredited novelist than the college boy,” thought Mrs. Weyman, looking at him through the spiraling smoke of her cigarette, which was mostly held in her fingers and very rarely in her lips, since she smoked only to put other smokers at their ease, including her daughter Anne,—and to keep young. “He’s changed since he came. Seems more manly, somehow. Firmer. And exhilarated about something too. I wonder, is it Joan? That she’s almost ten years older wouldn’t necessarily make any difference. Probably she’s the first woman of the world he has ever met,—at any rate seen so much of. She would be a revelation, a dream come true, to a young man of his background.” For Enderly’s family was totally undistinguished socially. Glenn had told his mother this, and added that Enderly boasted of the fact, and was more glad than otherwise not to belong to the “bloated bourgeoisie.” So, looking rather keenly at the young man through the smoke spiraling up through her fingers, Mrs. Weyman exclaimed with assumed casualness, “It’s rather sweet of Mrs. Nevin to be so nice to you young things! Having you to meet Michael Schwankovsky this afternoon and all! But I suppose, Prescott, you have unclassed yourself as a young thing by having produced ‘Stephen’s Fall’ and got famous. Glenn and Anne, of course, are merely being included along with you. Don’t you find her very charming?” Enderly was holding Anne’s hand, for all the decorum of their appearance, as it lay between them on the divan, under a fold of her outspread skirt. “Oh, very charming,” he answered, with casualness as assumed as his hostess’. “Beauty, brains and magnetism, all working together, make a very high-powered charm. And she must have used the full force of it on her bootlegger. We don’t get the chance to buy that quality from ours, do we, Glenn!”