The General turned again. The watchful Cecilia was certain that _he_ was not in love with Daphne. But the nephew--the inordinately handsome, and by now much-courted young man--what was the real truth about him? Cecilia recognized--with Mrs. Verrier--that merely to put the question involved a certain tribute to young Barnes. He had at any rate done his fortune-hunting, if fortune-hunting it were, with decorum. "Miss Floyd is looking well to-night," remarked the General. Cecilia did not reply. She and a great part of the room were engaged in watching Roger Barnes and Miss Maddison walking together through a space which seemed to have been cleared on purpose for them, but was really the result of a move towards the supper-room. "Was there ever such a pair?" said an enthusiastic voice behind the General. "Athene and Apollo take the floor!" A gray-haired journalist with a small, bewrinkled face, buried in whiskers, and beard, laid a hand on the General's arm as he spoke. The General smiled vaguely. "Do you know Mrs. and Miss Maddison?" "Rather!" said the little man. "Miss Elsie's a wonder! As pretty and soft as they make them, and a Greek scholar besides--took all sorts of honours at Radcliffe last year. I've known her from her cradle." "What a number of your girls go to college!" said the General, but ungraciously, in the tones of one who no sooner saw an American custom emerging than his instinct was to hit it. "Yes; it's a feature of our modern life--the life of our women. But not the most significant one, by a long way." The General could not help a look of inquiry. The journalist's face changed from gay to grave. "The most significant thing in American life just now----" "I know!" interrupted the General. "Your divorce laws!" The journalist shook his head. "It goes deeper than that. What we're looking on at is a complete transformation of the idea of marriage----" A movement in the crowd bore the speaker away. The General was left watching the beautiful pair in the distance. They were apparently quite unconscious that they roused any special attention. Laughing and chatting like two children, they passed into the supper-room and disappeared. Ten minutes later, in the supper-room, Barnes deserted the two ladies with whom he had entered, and went in pursuit of a girl in white, whose necklace of star sapphires, set in a Spanish setting of the seventeenth century, had at once caught the eye of the judicious. Roger, however, knew nothing of jewels, and was only conscious as he approached Miss Floyd, first of the mingling in his own mind of something like embarrassment with something like defiance, and then, of the glitter in the girl's dark eyes. "I hope you had an interesting debate," he said. "Mrs. Phillips tells me you went to the Senate."