Ronny did not really like Gloria Cargill. He did not really like big wheezy Colonel Kinney, whose talk was like his father’s--all sports and poker and bootleggers--but somehow not the same--a thousand times more monotonous. He did not really like Mrs. Kinney, who was fat and flat faced, who wore the most expensive clothes in the most startling colours and played bridge like an inspired card sharp. He never knew what to say to any of them, and they had a way of screaming with laughter at some embarrassed speech of his and then staring at him curiously, with cold eyes, touched slightly with contempt. They always made him feel that they knew perfectly what a coward he was, if his father did not. But even they were easier to endure than Gloria, for all that she took his father’s attention from him. His father said that Gloria Cargill was the most marvellous woman in New York, and all his world of rich men and expensive women and racing and cards and sport and supper clubs seemed to agree with him. She was the youthful widow of a tire king, and she spent her money like a spoiled empress. She was almost as tall as Andrew, with a lithe figure that was swaying and sleek either in a bathing suit or in one of her fabulous evening dresses. Her hair was wild red gold around the bold beauty of her face. Her brown-velvet eyes had little gold lights in them that burned when they looked at men, and the wet brightness of her mouth showed scarlet down the whole length of a hotel corridor or across a dance floor. For Ronny the worst of it was that she had discovered that he was painfully shy of handsome women and therefore delighted in tormenting him. She could turn the whole force of her fascination on him, like a headlight, in which he squirmed and blinked miserably, to her laughing delight. She adored running a glittering hand suddenly down his coat sleeve, drowning him in her gusts of perfume, clinging with a burlesque of devotion to his arm and flashing her heady glance into his dazzled eyes. Once or twice Andrew had seen him blanch and jerk his hand back involuntarily and he had been furious, because an assured gallantry to women was to Andrew the fundamental of red-blooded masculinity. He lashed out savagely to the boy, if in a low voice, in one of those sudden rages which reddened his face uncontrollably. The whole thing fixed Ronny in his miserable sense of inferiority.