Matthews exuded prosperity from his lavender socks up to his insistent tie--but the brilliancy did not seem to go higher. Conklin was apologetic in comparison. His face was spare, and when he was amused, deep curved wrinkles formed on either side of his mouth like brackets. The parenthetical effect of his smile was heightened by the fact that the rest of his face remained sombre. The poet looked his part. When Yetta arrived, they were all looking at the latest number of _La vie parisienne_. Mrs. Treadway was shaking--like a gelatine pudding--over the predicament in which one of Fabriano's naked women was portrayed. Potter began a ponderous argument on the humor of Audrey Beardsley's lines and the wit of Matisse's color. He pronounced Fabriano "too obvious." He was happily interrupted by the announcement of dinner. The conversation rambled on through the meal. No one stuck to a subject after their epigrams had run out. Nobody was deeply interested in anything. Much of it dealt with things about which Yetta was proud of her ignorance. The dinner was almost a disaster to her. "Of course," she told herself as she walked home, "this group is not typical. There are people, there must be people, who take their writing seriously." But the attitude of Maud Ripley and her friends had shocked Yetta deeply. The worst of it was that they respected her in a way--because she was "making good." But the fact that she was in earnest did not interest them. She would not have dropped the least in their esteem if she had been utterly insincere. She felt as if she had been insulted. The next day a new incident increased Yetta's feeling of foreignness in the office. She was waiting in the reporters' room for a chance to see Brace. Cowan, the gray-haired sporting editor, was telling whimsical stories of the "old days" when he had been a cub. Although older in years than the others, he was the youngest-hearted of them all. Yetta felt more drawn to him than to any one else on _The Star_. Suddenly a curly-haired Irishman, O'Rourke, burst in. He always entered a room with a deafening bang. "Gee," he said--"some story this morning. A greenhorn bank-examiner, who didn't know his A B C, dropped into Ex-Governor Billings' bank yesterday and found a pretty mess. The old boy never had a bank-examiner come in unexpectedly like that before in his long and useful life. It nearly gave him apoplexy. And he just putting up his name for the Senate. But this blundering bank-examiner was not such a fool after all. The story goes that Billings had to come across with an awful wad to hush him up." "Why? Did the examiner find something wrong?" Yetta asked. "Yes, my child," O'Rourke said with playful pity. "He was that foolish." "What did he find?" Yetta persisted. "Unsecured loans. Billings had been lending himself the depositors' money, using his calling card as collateral." "What'll happen to Billings?"