Nicholas’ spirit was cleansed by the sight of his city. He said: “When we come back, the lights in the windows will give us the silhouette.” He sat peacefully, a smile on his lips and glory in his eyes. I wondered that Eva did not see that this was pure delight. I wondered if he had it in him to love Eva as he so evidently loved his birth-place. “It’s magnificent,” he said, as if to himself. “There’s nothing like it.” For these white buildings were children of the womb of Manhattan. He peered through the twilight to miss nothing of the serrated mass, and I understood that his mind did not see that it was twilight, unless it was a twilight of the gods. His mind was crowded with the city of the future, austere, immense, but springing from the growth of the town and of man’s necessities, as all great architecture does. Leaning back with her half-smile, Eva said with forbearance: “How can I be sure that you admire me, when you cling to your city? I am not of your city.” He turned to her. “Admire you? Why--never before in my life was there the absolute! You’ve the great gift of beauty, Eva.” She sighed gently. “No other gifts, Nick? I think I should like you to add the greater gift of intelligence.” Laughing, he tightened his arm around her shoulders. “That isn’t worth a tinker’s damn beside your lovely face.” She said: “You’ll spoil my coat.” He glanced at me. “Isn’t Eva’s idea of sentiment an oddity?” Of her he enquired meekly: “Where are we bound for? I cling to my old-fashioned notion that I feel more comfortable if I know the name of my host or hostess. The other night--don’t you remember?--Molly Underhill screamed at a young man with a powdered face who was running as fast as he could to the centre of the gathering ‘Whose party is this?’ And the young man lisped ‘I’m thure I don’t know. I was bwought here by thomeone.’” “Don’t be foolish,” said Eva. He openly admired her. “Do you know, Eva, you can speak like a gangster--out of the corner of a rigid mouth! You have so many accomplishments.” But Eva disliked being teased. She walked into the thickest of the party well ahead of us; and Nicholas was indiscreet enough to follow. I was to find, in the course of the night’s festivities, that he watched her with the same teasing smile on his lips that already had put her in a defiant mood. The visiting Englishman was holding forth to a circle of cheerful spirits. “Do you know how to live, you Americans?” surprisingly asked the Englishman of these proprietors of the latest luxuries in the world. “Or do you live? Did you see the flea circus?” Charles Glidden, owning to having seen the flea circus several times, requested to know if this chain of thought were kind. “Freye Remsen bought one--in a glass box--named Emma. Emma dropped her party manners in the home; the next morning she bit him.” Freye Remsen’s eyes filmed with embarrassment. “What was wrong with that?” he asked. Glidden enquired: “What do you object to?”