"Same old bunch. Grace left out nothing that could be brought in. Most of the entertaining nowadays is a game of show-down, regular exhibitions of lace and silver and food and flowers and china and glass, and gorgeous gowns and stupid people. I'm getting sick of them." "Why don't you start a new kind? You might have your butler hand a note to each of your guests on arriving, stating that all the things other people had for their tables you had for yours, but only what was necessary would be used. Then you might have a good time. It's difficult to talk down to an excess of anything." "Wish I had the nerve to do it!" Kitty again changed her position; fixed more comfortably the pink-lined, embroidered pillows at her back, and looked at me uncertainly. I waited. Presently she leaned toward me. "People are talking about you, Danny. You won't mind if I tell you?" Her blue eyes, greatly troubled, looked into mine, then away, and her hand slipped into my hand and held it tightly. "Sometimes I hate people! They are so mean, so nasty!" "What are they saying?" I straightened the slender fingers curled about mine and stroked them. "Only dead people aren't talked about. What is being said about me?" "Horrid things--not to me, of course. They'd better not be! But--Mrs. Herbert came to see me yesterday afternoon. She wasn't at the luncheon and Grace got the first rap, but most of her hatefulness she took out on you. She's worse than a germ disease. I always feel I ought to be disinfected after I see her. If she were a leper she wouldn't be allowed at large, and she's much more deadly. People like that ought to be locked up." "What did she tell you about me?" I smiled in Kitty's flushed face, smiled also at the remembrance of Alice Herbert's would-be cut some time ago, but I did not mention it. "You oughtn't to be so hard on her. She's crazy." "But crazy people are dangerous. A mosquito can kill a king, and a king has to be careful about mosquitoes. I'm more afraid of people than I am of insects. If you could only label them--" "People label themselves. What did Alice Herbert say about me?" "First, of course, how strange it was that you should care to live in Scarborough Square, especially as you were a person who held yourself so aloof from--" "People like her. I do. What else did she say?" "That you met all sorts of people, had all sorts to come and see you. A trained nurse who is with a sick friend of her aunt's told her she'd heard you let a--let a bad woman come in your house." Kitty's voice trailed huskily. "She said it would ruin you if things like that got out. I told her it was a lie--it wasn't so." "It was so." I held Kitty's eyes, horror-filled and unbelieving. "She stayed with Mrs. Mundy a week. Yesterday she went away to the mountains--to die."