It has come at last, and much sooner than I had dared to expect. Of course I am speaking of Miss Pearl Veal's engagement to Plumstone Smith, Jr. Poor Plumstone! He is heart-broken. I saw him at the Ping-pong Club the other afternoon, smoking a cigarette and gazing abstractedly into the depths of a Scotch highball. He did not speak to me, and even though he might not have intended to cut me dead, such action would surely be in his right. And the cruel stories in _Town Twaddle_ are at the bottom of it all. Last week that paper in its leader, in a guarded statement giving no names, announced that the engagement of a certain rich and beautiful girl, a new-comer from the West in Society, to a well-known clubman and cotillon-leader, a son of an old and impoverished family, had been broken. It said that the young man's mother was in bed with nervous prostration, as she had had her house elaborately decorated and had bought some stock on margins on the strength of the improvement in the family prospects; that the youth himself was spending his days in one of his clubs, pounding a bell and crying, "The same!" But still more cruel, it laid the wreck of this home to a young real-estate agent, name not given, who had been insinuating himself into the graces of the innocent beauty. Now, did you ever hear the beat of that? In a separate paragraph it most politely intimated that Miss Pearl Veal's engagement to me would soon be announced. Where _Town Twaddle_ got the story is a mystery, for it is true to the part where it accuses me of insinuating myself into the affections of another man's fiancée. Though I have known Pearl Veal many months, I do not think we had spoken a dozen words to each other up to the day when we all went skating at Exudo. Then I must admit, as we sat on the bank smoking cigarettes and watching Plumstone cavorting around the ice with Marian Speechless, she revealed her heart to me. No one was more astounded than I.