'Yes, better of heat than of cold,' laughed Trix Trevalla triumphantly, and she added, 'If there's anything wrong, why, he's responsible!' She was amused both at the idea of anything being wrong and at the notion of holding the quiet shabby man responsible. There could be no link between his life and the world she had lived in that night. Yet, if he held these views about the way to treat life, why did he not live? He had said he hardly lived, he only worked. Trix was in an amused puzzle about the shabby man as she got into bed; he actually put the party and its great _ballet_ out of her head. CHAPTER III IN DANES INN Some men maintained that it was not the quantity, nor the quality, nor the colour of Peggy Ryle's hair that did the mischief, but simply and solely the way it grew. Perhaps (for the opinion of men in such matters is eminently and consciously fallible) it did not grow that way at all, but was arranged. The result to the eye was the same, a peculiar harmony between the waves of the hair, the turn of the neck, and the set of the head. So notable and individual a thing was this agreement that Arthur Kane and Miles Childwick, poet and critic, were substantially at one about it. Kane described it as 'the artistry of accident,' Childwick lauded its 'meditated spontaneity.' Neither gentleman was ill-pleased with his phrase, and each professed a polite admiration of the other's effort--these civilities are necessary in literary circles. Other young men painted or drew the hair, and the neck, and the head, till Peggy complained that her other features were neglected most disdainfully. Other young men again, not endowed with the gift of expression by tongue or by hand, contented themselves with swelling Peggy's court. She did not mind how much they swelled it. She had a fine versatility, and could be flirted with in rhyme, in polished periods, in modern slang, or in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet; the heart is, of course, the thing in such a matter, various forms of expression no more than its interpreters. Meanwhile Peggy learnt men and their manners, caused a good deal of picturesque misery--published and unpublished--and immensely increased the amenity of life wherever she went. And she went everywhere, when she could pay a cab fare and contrive a frock, or borrow one or both of these commodities. (Elfreda Flood, for instance, often had a frock.) She generally returned the cab fare, and you could usually regain the frock by personal exertions; it was not considered the correct thing to ask her directly for either. She had an income of forty pounds a year, and professed to be about to learn to paint in real earnest. There was also an uncle in Berlin who sent cheques at rare and irregular intervals. When a cheque came, Peggy gave a dinner-party; when there had been no cheque for a long while, Peggy accepted a dinner. That was all the difference it made. And anyhow there was always bread-and-butter to be had at Airey Newton's.