"I should say so. Your mother is smiling all over. She even favored me. Look out, though, Doris--she'll begin on you." [Illustration: "'Just you wait; you're going to be one of the big men some day!'"] "Don't worry, Bojo," she said in a whisper, with a little pressure of his arm. She was quite excited by the brilliance of the throng, at her own personal triumph and the good looks of her partner. "I want something I can make myself, and we'll do it too. Just you wait, you're going to be one of the big men one of these days, and we'll have our house and our parties--finer than this, too!" This time he fell into her mood, turning her over to another partner with a confident smile, exhilarated with the thought of little supremacies in regions of brilliant lights and dreamy music. Fred DeLancy, back from a dance with Gladys Stone, stopped him with an anecdote. "I say, Bojo, wish you could have seen some of the old hens inspecting the palace. You know Mrs. Orchardson, Standard Oil? I was right back of her when she wandered into some Louis or other room, and what did she do? She ran her thumbnail into a partition and whispered to her neighbor: 'Ours is real mahogany'! Don't they love one another, though?" By the buffet groups of men were smoking, glass in hand, Borneman and Haggerdy talking business. In the ante-chamber where the great marble staircase came winding down, he found Patsie at bay repelling a group of admirers. She signaled him frantically. "Bojo; rescue me. They're even quoting poetry to me!" She sprang away and down the stairs to his side, hurrying him off. "Faster, faster! Isn't there any place we can hide? My ears are dropping off." "Patsie, I never should have known you!" he said, amazed. "Well, I'm out!" she said, with an indignant pout. "How do you like me?" She stood away from him, a little malicious delight in her eyes at his bewilderment, her chin saucily tilted, her profile turned, her little hands balanced in the air. "This is the way the models pose. Well?" "I thought you were a child--" he said stupidly, troubled at the sudden discovery of the woman. "Is that all?" she said, pretending displeasure. He checked an impulsive compliment and said a little angrily: "Oh, Patsie, you are going to make a terrible amount of trouble. I can see that!" "Pooh!" "Yes, and you like the mischief you're causing too. Don t fib!" "Yes, I like it," she said, nodding her head. "Dolly and Doris stared at me as if I were a ghost. Well, I'll show them I'm not such a savage." "I hope you won't change," he said. "Won't I?" she said, and to tease him she continued, "I'll show them!" He felt sentimentally moved to give her a lecture, but instead he said, deeply moved: "I'd hate to think of your being different." "Oh, really?" she continued irrelevantly. "You didn't bother your soul about me while you thought I was nothing but a tomboy and a terror! But now when there are a lot of black flies buzzing around me--"