“We all know,” he crowed over me. “It happened the day that you, in a spirit of mistaken decency, left a tea at the Savoy Plaza. Never, my dear Dinah, leave a splendid scene because of a feeling for what is right.” “She seemed a tragic sight,” I put in as my excuse. “Eva?” He was amused. I shook my head. “The old lady. She was having a terrible time controlling herself, you know.” “That’s what made it such a magnificent scene. Those old girls were taught self-control at the proper boarding schools. And when she sees fit she can defend herself. The old lady needs no help from the itinerant author. Oh, I’ve been hanging around her whenever I found an opportunity!” His laugh, seldom heard, was always startling; it was a high, whinnying laugh. “I assure you that she doesn’t feel a whit humbled in presence of our various names and fames. Her pleasure in identifying those of us whose photographs she’s seen appended to book reviews is almost sadistic. She’s long since recovered the balance that you feared to see her throw overboard. She seems to think that our pictures hadn’t prepared her for the truth. Once upon a time, when I was hanging on her words, she said loftily: ‘And who, pray, is that strange woman with a face like a mask?’ She graciously assisted me in identifying the lady with ‘Ah I don’t wonder you are at a loss! They all wear masks, these celebrities.’ The term she so derisively threw at us seemed to taste bad; only her famous self-control prevented her making a face. She was, at the time, attentively regarding a pale poet who looked, if the truth must be told, half drowned, and at Molly Underhill who has, as we know, an eye that is lewd in its open questing. She said ‘Humph! Indeed! All diseased, I fear. It is a disease, this writing of books.’ You’ll notice that she seldom abbreviates her words. There’s nothing slovenly about her.” The woman with a face like a mask must have been Florence Quincy, I said. Interested in oddities in others, she was herself strange in appearance.