Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing the resemblances of Vigné to her grandmother. She had no doubt that the parties Vigné shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the informal dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated; there was on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element anyhow--cocktails. The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young daughter's breath, filled her with an old instinctive sickness. She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigné; but during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she gave her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp. When she had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by the juvenile Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation at his sister's unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went on: “Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill, with a watch held; and Vigné, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize for length of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--” Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his assertions pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the realization of how pathetically little he knew of either Vigné or her. She weighed the question of utter frankness here--the quality enhanced by universal obscurity--but she was obliged to check her desire for perfect understanding. A purely feminine need to hide, even from Arnaud, any detracting facts about women shut her into a diplomatic silence. In reality he could offer them no help; their problems--in a world created more objectively by the hand of man than God--were singular to themselves. Women were quite like spoiled captives to foreign princes, masking, in their apparent complacency, a necessarily secret but insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't do, in view of this, to expose too much. The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a letter from Pleydon. “He wants us to come over to New York and his studio,” the former explained. “He has some commission or other from a city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be overlooked.” Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in his narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room. “It's a duplex,” he explained of his quarters; “the dining-room you see and the kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over our heads; the studio fills both floors.”