I judged from his face that Nicholas was in a better humour. On the drive uptown Eva’s manner towards him had been intimate. She had enquired playfully: “Didn’t I see you--the chaste and elegant you--kissing Molly Underhill, down at Yancey’s?” He had rejoined that he regretted it. “She’s kissing everyone. But I’m sure it wasn’t Molly I kissed. Are you sure it was?” She had laughed, and had called him by her most passionate term of endearment: “Nick--you old dear!” He had been so pleased, so cheered, that I suspected this was nearly all he ever got from Eva. Men and women shoved through the front door, stormed the stairway, and fell back on the little hall. I was washed up by this human wave to the slight protection of a console, and found that again I was pressed close to Nicholas. I told him: “I do feel like the wrath of God. I know now why men pulling out of a spree just pitch in and get drunk all over again.” I pushed my bang off my forehead, and heard myself say with deep emotion: “Oh--hell!” Bill Metcalf came to lean against the console, and found me in possession and looked the other way. “I’m apologizing,” he said simply. “For what?” Not that I cared. “Yancey says I tickled you, down at our party,” explained the chastened Bill. “Yancey says she never saw anything so disgusting. She says you howled, and rolled up in a ball.” I became indignant. “Why shouldn’t I roll up in a ball? I happen to be ticklish.” Out of a pensive pause, I added: “I don’t remember a thing about it.” Bill fretted: “The point is, I don’t see why in the mischief I wanted to tickle you. I wish I could understand how I came to do it. It never entered my head to want to do it.” Yancey, her vividly pretty face distorted by her resentment, bore down on the more or less homely faces in the hall. She started in at once: “What a night! Dinah, our place is all but demolished!” The big Englishman had sat in a newly upholstered armchair, and the armchair had creaked, had groaned, and had finally collapsed in the backbone of its structure. At this stage, I appear to have wailed: “If it were only a chair that had been wrecked on the beach this night----!” I seem to have gone further, and to have confided to them all that I had a weak character; for here I was, at the tail of the evening and ready to drop with fatigue, and nothing could induce me to go home before this party broke up. In an effort to meet him half-way, I said to Nicholas: “This is how we keep it up. Don’t you see that we can’t help it? Why, then, come down hard on Eva?” I was indignant when he hit back at me with his idea that we did not keep it up; he had noticed, he said, that we were dropping by the wayside. The wayside appealing to me at this moment as a tempting deathbed, I leaned more heavily against the console and sighed: “I can’t follow out even a feeble thought.”