There was a certain incongruity in Charlie’s words, as it seemed to Arthur; it might have been Wemyss who was speaking, instead of this careless young Epicurean, who usually troubled himself little with abstractions and general categories, but occupied his understanding with perceiving the most practical sort of causes and effects. The fact was that Townley had used the current slang of his set, word-counters for thought, and his mind was already far from the subject, and his lips framed to the whistle of an air from “Iolanthe.” They turned into Sixth Avenue (which is a strange, conglomerate street--insolently disreputable at times, elsewhere commercially prosperous, or even given to small tradesmen and other healthy citizenship, but always, in its earlier days, at least, rakishly indifferent to brown-stone-front respectability) and stopped at a little shop in a tiny two-story brick block. On the left was a little glass door, with the simple legend _Rose Marie_ upon the panel; and in front of them a toy staircase, leading to the imminent upper regions. Through the glass of the door Arthur could see one or two bonnets on pegs in the window, and he divined that the shop was a milliner’s. “Is Miss Starbuck in?” said Charlie to a child who appeared with a candle. The child (who was either deformed or very old-looking for her age) looked keenly at Arthur, whose eyes fell helplessly before her searching gaze. “She has gone to a concert at the Garden,” said the child. As they spoke, there was a murmur of men’s voices from an adjoining room, and a rough clatter of applause, with knocking of heels and sticks. “All right,” said Townley. “Good-night.” And after this somewhat inexplicable call the two young men went back to their Fifth Avenue lodgings. Here they found John Haviland, largely reposing himself on two chairs before Arthur’s hospitable hearth. Haviland and Arthur had met many times since the Farnum ball; and Arthur was more pleased than surprised at finding him in his rooms to-night. “I’m so glad you waited--I’ve just come from the Livingstones,” said he. “Charlie, let me introduce my friend Mr. Haviland--Mr. Townley. Have a cigar--oh, you’ve got a pipe, have you?” The others already had cigars; and disposing themselves in attitudes of permanent equilibrium, all plunged into the divine cloud of vapor until such times as the genius of the place should move them to speech. “Is the Miss Holyoke who is staying at the Livingstones’ your cousin?” asked Haviland, finally. “Yes,” said Arthur. “Don’t you know her?” “What a queer old thing that Miss Brevier is,” said Charlie. “Can you believe it, she used to be a bosom-friend of Mrs. Levison G.!” “Pity Miss Brevier dropped her,” said Haviland, dryly. “Miss Brevier drop her?” said Charlie, whose sense of humor was sometimes, at a critical moment, deficient. “You are chaffing.” “Mrs. Gower,” said Haviland, gravely, “does more harm than any woman in New York.”