Frankie Dean had been watching her chance for another at his expense. Now she asked, with apparent frankness: "Mr. Granthope, can you tell character by the lines on the soles of the feet?" "Science of Solistry," murmured Keith to the Santa Rosa girl. "Let’s try it!" Mrs. Page exclaimed. "I will, for one! Do you know my second toe’s longer than my great toe? I’m awfully proud of it. I can prove it, too!" "Go on!" Frankie Dean dared her. The girl from Santa Rosa stared, her lips apart. "Why, every one’s is, aren’t they?" "No such thing!" Mrs. Page stopped and almost blushed. A chorus of laughter. "Oh, there are a good many better ways of telling character than that," said Granthope. "Yes," Keith put in. "Indiscreet remarks, for instance." Mrs. Page bit her lip and shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, if I were going in for indiscreet remarks I might make a few about _you_!" Here Sully interposed. "Isn’t this conversation getting rather personal? I move we discard all these low cards. This is no woman’s club. The quiet life for mine." The hint was taken by Keith, who began an English music-hall song, to the effect that "John was a nice good ’usband, ’e never cared to roam, ’e only wanted a quiet life, ’e only wanted a quiet wife; there ’e would sit by the fireside, such a chilly man was John—" where he was joined in the chorus by Fernigan—"Oh, I ’opes and trusts there’s a nice ’ot fire, where my old man’s gone!" Maxwell pounded in time upon the table. The girl from Santa Rosa hazarded a laugh. Granthope looked on listlessly, ever more detached and introspective. This was what he had been used to, since he could remember, but now, in the stuffy little room, with its ghastly yellow gas-light, the smell of eatables and wine, the pallor of the women’s faces, the flush of Maxwell’s, the desperate frivolity, the artificiality of it all bored him. He wondered, whimsically, why he had ever looked forward to being the companion of such a society as this. It was all harmless enough, unconventional as it was, but he tasted the ashes in his mouth. Perhaps, after all, he was only not in the mood for it. He tried to smile again. Fernigan seized a small Turkish rug from the floor and hung it in front of him, like a chasuble. Standing before the company he intoned a sacrilegious parody, like everything he did, funny, like everything he did, atrocious: "_O, sanctissimus nabisco in colorado maduro domino te deum, e pluribus unum vice versa et circus hippocriticam, mephisto apollinaris nux vomica dolores intimidad mores; O rara avis per diem cum magnum vino et sappho modus vivendi felicitas,_" to the droned "_A—men_."