By this time the court-room was filling up with its usual motley crowd of interested parties and spectators. There were the seekers after freedom, a heterogeneous collection of them, in all sorts and conditions of clothes, of all ages and of all kinds of faces and figures. There were the women from the millionaire colonies of the East, chic, sleek, and composed. They retired into a far corner with their attorneys, conferring in low tones, or else sitting, apparently unperturbed, while waiting for their cases to be called. There were always the adventuress types, chic, too, but made up with an eye to future conquest, their skirts always tighter or wider or shorter or longer than the style decreed, their hair a little more so-so, their lips redder, their cheeks rosier, and their faces whiter than their more conservative sisters of a narrower way. There were tired women from far states not allowing divorces for cruelty or desertion. They sat, in nondescript clothes, most of them, with eyes heavy-lidded, as if they were too weary to care much what happened to them. There were gay young creatures, dancers and small-time vaudeville actresses, who refused to take life seriously and who availed themselves of a dull season to make themselves free for another venture. There was a sprinkling of men, one of them a lumber magnate from an Eastern state, another a noted cabaret entertainer. They sat around, restlessly out of place, but at the same time taking an interest in those about them. Supplementing these were the spectators. Among them were tourists who came to Reno for the express purpose of attending the divorce trials. Inquisitive folk, regular residents of the town, dropped in to pass an hour's time and to gather gossip for the afternoon tea-table. Club-women, anxious to find food for reform, took up their seats close to the railing, determined that no word of the testimony or proceedings should escape them. And there were the usual hangers-on, old men and women with nothing to do, who found entertainment in listening to the human dramas unfolded from the witness-stand. Raymond Thomas, before taking his seat at the lawyers' table, took a comprehensive view of his audience. Lifting the skirt of his frock-coat, he sat down, viewing the world and himself complacently. He heard the court-room door swing to, and, looking up, he saw the sheriff coming toward him with Mrs. Margaret Davis by his side.