"Why not dancing, Lambert, old Eli?" Dalrymple called jovially. "Haul these gospel sharks off----Waiter! I say, waiter! Something bubbly, dry, and nineteen hundred, if they're doing us that well." The others didn't protest. They seemed to arrange themselves as a friendly screen between Dalrymple and the elderly men. George didn't care to talk to Dalrymple in that condition--there was too much that Dalrymple had always wanted to say and hadn't. He started for the door, but Wandel caught his arm. "Wait around, very strong person," he whispered. "Dolly doesn't know it, but he's leaving in a minute." George shook his head, and started on. Dalrymple glanced up. "Morton!" he said. Goodhue took the glass from the waiter, but Dalrymple, grinning a shamed sort of triumph and comprehension, reached out for it and sipped. "Not bad. Great dancer, Morton. Around the end, and through the centre, and all that----" "Keep quiet," Goodhue warned him. George knew that the other wouldn't. He shrank from the breaking of the sullen truce between them. Dalrymple glanced at his cuffs, spilling a little of the wine. "Damned sight more useful to stick to your laundry--it's none too good." Quite distinctly George caught Lambert's startled change of countenance and his quick movement forward, Goodhue's angry flush, Wandel's apparent unconcern. In that moment he measured his advance, understood all he had got from Squibs and books, from Betty, from Goodhue, from Princeton; but, although he easily conquered his first impulse to strike, his rage glowed the hotter because it was confined. As he passed close he heard Lambert whisper: "Good man!" But even then Wandel wouldn't let him go, and the music had stopped again, and only the undefinable shadows of women's voices reached him. He tried to shake off Wandel who had followed him to the hall. He couldn't wait. He had to enter that moving, chattering crowd to find out what Sylvia had decided. "Go downstairs, great man," Wandel was whispering, "get a cab, and wait in it at the door, so that you will be handy when I bring the infant Bacchus out." "I'd rather not," George said, impatiently. "Someone else will do." "By no means. Expediency, my dear friend, and the general welfare. Hercules for little Bacchus." He couldn't refuse. Wandel and Goodhue, and, for that matter all of Dalrymple's friends, those girls in there, depended on him; yet he knew it was a bad business for him and for Dalrymple; and he wanted above all other things to pass for a moment through that brilliant screen that moved perpetually between him and Sylvia. He waited in the shadows of the cab until Dalrymple and Wandel left the building. Wandel motioned the other into the cab. Dalrymple obeyed, willingly enough, swinging his stick, and humming off the key. Probably Wandel's diplomacy. Wandel jumped in, called an address to the driver, and slammed the door. "Where are you taking him?" George asked.