“Oh—it is one of Madame Géry’s models!” rolled out an unforgettably doughy voice. “How fortunate—will you tell Madame Géry, my dear, that I am coming Saturday instead of to-morrow?” Joy nodded and made her escape, walking swiftly, battling an insane desire to shriek with laughter and startle the inmates of the Copley out of their stodgy repose. Grant kept his silence on ice as they left the hotel and he signaled for a taxi. When he helped her into the machine that finally drew up, Joy burst forth with the hysterical giggles she had been fighting. “Will you please stop laughing long enough to tell me your address?” Grant asked, in the same tone with which he told the driver where to go, when she gasped out the number. What nonsense—Grant knew her address. Everything was getting to be nonsense— They rode for some minutes with no sound but Joy’s laughter. Grant spoke at last. “Did I hear right? Did that—that woman say you were—a model? Is that true, Joy?” “No—yes,—that is,—well, I was once in a manner of speaking—” She went off again into what sounded like perfect carillons of laughter. “Joy—can’t you control yourself any better than this—don’t you know how you are hurting me?” She was suddenly quiet. “You are hurting me, too, Grant. I don’t know what’s happened—but something has—and everything is so awful that I can’t seem to believe that it used to be so wonderful.” She started to sob in pitiful little hiccoughs. He made no move to comfort her, but stared ahead of him in the taxi. “You’re right, Joy—something has happened. I saw Packy this week—and he said certain things about you that made me pound the everlasting daylight out of him. Knowing you—and everything that had passed between us—naturally I called him a liar and rammed his words back in his throat.” Joy had stopped sobbing; her hysterics were shocked out of her. “What did he say about me?” she cried sharply. “What did he say about me?” “He told me—what kind of girls you were living with and the kind of life you led—from man to man instead of from hand to mouth is the way he put it——” The numbness of utter bewilderment possessed her. In a choked silence she listened to his voice droning over the rattle of the taxi. “And then—I come to meet you—and find you talking with a man—who seems to think he knows you pretty well—a man who as good as told Packy and me what to do with ourselves, the other night down at the dance, as if he owned you—and then a bunch of would-be speeds that I happen to know are no living good, hail you as a boon companion—call out to you in a way no girl should be spoken to in a public dining-room——” “Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells, and the Lowells speak only to God!” Joy murmured. A nebular recklessness, as if she were moving in a dream, had settled upon her. “Go on—you haven’t reached the part where I became a model!”