“Returned war hero!” Joy cried, her mind a suspended blank to be written over with wonder. Jerry said nothing with fierce intensity of question. “Why, yes,” said Mabel. “Stop nudging me, Phil, I will if I want to!—He was over for a long time, and brought back millions of those little citation ribbons which he gave me with instructions to bury—stop, Phil!” Another man-servant—did they have _two_ butlers?—announced dinner at this moment, and Mabel gave Joy to her brother, leading the way with Jerry and leaving her husband to the girl with the white forehead, who so far had said nothing of any irrelevance, and so had made little impression on the party. As they settled themselves behind the fruit cocktails, Joy watched Phil Lancaster, who kept his eyes fixed on Jerry across the table. “Is—is the resemblance so very striking?” she probed gently. “Not so very, after the first look.” He took his eyes away from Jerry with a jolt and landed them on Joy for one perfunctory second. “Your friend is quite a different type.” His eyes found Jerry again; and Jerry’s short, thick lashes quivered as she raised her chin higher and looked determinedly at Mabel, who was stretching out a large fund of small talk. “That girl with the brown hair and white forehead—is she another cousin?” asked Joy, still quietly insistent that he should talk to her. He drew his eyes back to Joy. “No; she’s a Bryn Mawr girl, one of Mabel’s protégés. Mabel’s awfully keen on younger girls.” “You don’t like ‘younger girls,’ do you?” His tone had been descriptive. “Why—has Mabel been getting biographic?” “No; she didn’t say anything about you to me; I just guessed. And as long as I have guessed, I think you ought to tell me why.” There was a pause as a third man in livery came between them with the soup, an opportunity he enriched by looking at Jerry; then he said: “To tell you why—would not make dinner conversation. But a young girl flaunting her conscious beauty and youth does not interest me, any more than I would give other than a passing look to a large coloured advertisement on a billboard.” “And how about older women?” she asked, letting his statement pass without battle. “Oh—they have either lost interest in life and are only pretending, or their minds are one-track affairs.” “My——” said Joy thoughtfully. “It must be awful to be a bachelor.” They both laughed then, and Jerry looked across the table with an answering gleam. His eyes caught hers for an intimate moment; then she turned back to Mabel and he to Joy. “I admit it sounded humourous,” he said. “But I told you, the rest would not be dinner conversation.” “When did you go across?” she asked abruptly. Her words carried across the table, and Jerry’s polite attention to Mabel took on another tin. “In the fall of ’17.”