He wondered when, or, rather, by what means, he should hear from her again; perhaps--although it required no reply--in response to the letter he had written to the Groves acknowledging their kindness and thanking them for it. To Lee, William Loyd Grove was more immaterial than a final shred of mist lifting from the sunken road across the golf course; even his appreciation of the other's good qualities had vanished, leaving nothing at all. He was confused by the ease with which the real, the solid, became the nebulous and unreal, as though the only standard of values, of weights and measures, lay absurdly in his own inconsequential attitude. * * * * * The Randons had no formal meal on Sunday night; but there were sandwiches, a bowl of salad, coffee, and what else were referred to generally as drinks; and a number of people never failed to appear. It was always an occasion of mingled conversations, bursts of popular song at the piano, and impromptu dancing through the length of the lower floor. The benches at either side of the fire-place were invariably crowded; and, from her place on the over-mantel, Cytherea's gaze rested on the vivacious or subdued current of life. Lee Randon often gazed up at her, and tonight, sunk in a corner with scarcely room to move the hand which held a cigarette, this lifted interrogation was prolonged. Mrs. Craddock, whom he had not seen since the dinner-dance at the club, sat beside him in a vivid green dress with large black beads strung from her left shoulder. She looked very well, he reflected; that was a becoming dimple in her cheek. He had had the beginning of an interest in her--new to Eastlake, and her husband dead, she had taken a house there for the winter--but that had vanished now. He was deep in thought when she said: “Didn't I hear that you were infatuated with that doll?” Who, he demanded, had told her such a strange story? “But she does attract me,” he admitted; “or, rather, she raises a great many questions, natural in a person named Cytherea. The pair of castanets on a nail--Claire used them in an Andalusian dance--might almost be an offering, like the crutches of Lourdes, left before her by a grateful child of the ballet.” “I can't see what you do, of course; but she reminds me of quantities of women--fascinating on the outside and nothing within. Men are always being fooled by that: they see a face or hear a voice that starts something or other going in them, and they supply a complete personality just as they prefer it, like the filling of a paté case. That is what you have done with this doll--imagined a lot of things that don't exist.”