She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats, coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes. There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet skirts for Act Two underneath. Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly's invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be smitingly swift. At nine o'clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick. But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology and ahead of him. "This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won't you sit down?" He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table, obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters. "Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It's mild enough to sit out on the terrace." She met him with her levelest gaze. "Aren't you going to be comfortable here?" "Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?" "Zoe can sleep," she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her brows, "even through the fire of your presence." "Good!" he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to be quizzical. "So this is where you live." He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details, his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples. She seated herself across the little square of table. "You don't seem to care for us here." "Certainly I do, only--only--" "Only what?" "Only--well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place--it just isn't you--that's all." "Nonsense! I don't count. I'm just a sort of a means to an end, anyway." "What end?" "The wine!" "The what?" "Oh, nothing," she said, and laughed. "Laugh again." "Why?" "I like it."