“A party at Ariana Joyce’s. I wasn’t doing any more harm there than the rest of the Allied armies. But it was pretty odious.” The memory jarred into the present satisfaction. He halted his long fingers on the keys and Margot came rustling in, her gown of sheer black muslin painted with yellow flowers and gold combs in her hair. “Were you playing L’Après Midi?--And he’s only twenty, Olive! Most Americans don’t rise to respectable music until they’ve lost all their money and have to come and live over here. Any nails in your shoes, Gurdy? We’re going to a dance.” “Where?” asked Olive. “Something for war widows at Mrs. Rossiter-Rossiter-Rossiter’s--that fat woman from Victoria. I promised some one or other I’d come. We’ll go in time for supper.” The charity dance seemed less fevered than dances in Paris. There were ranks of matrons about the walls of a dull, long room. At midnight Margot rescued him from a girl who was using him as an introduction to American economics and found a single table in the supper hall. Here the batter of ill played ragtime was endurable and the supping folk entertained him. “The country’s so ghastly with houses shut and no servants that most people have stuck to town,” Margot said, refusing wine. “Lot of eminences here. Who’re you looking at?” “The dark girl in pink. She’s familiar.” “She should be. She has a press agent in New York. Lady Selene Tucker. She’s going to marry that man who looks like a Lewis Baumer picture in Punch as soon as every one’s in town again and she can get Westminster Abbey and he can get his mother shipped to New Zealand, or somewhere. His mother will drink too much and then tell lies about Queen Victoria. She’s rather quaint. She sues for libel every time any one writes a novel with a dissolute peeress in it. Frightfully self-conscious. Don’t people who insist on telling you how depraved they are make you rather ill? They always seem to think they’ve made such a good job of it. And I could think of much worse things to do.--How nice your hair is! Like Uncle Eddie’s.” “Thanks. Who’s the skinny woman with the pearls?” Margot put aside the palm branch that shadowed her chin and frowned. “It looks like my namesake, Mrs. Asquith, from this angle.--No, it’s Lady Flint. Oh, look at the big brute in mauve. Lovely, isn’t she?” He looked at the shapely, fair woman without interest. The round of Margot’s forearm took his eyes back. “Lovely? Why?”