"Tell me all about the sculptress and about the Rider Haggard lady with the earrings," she said. Claude explained that these ladies were both considered freaks even among the Outlaws: Charlotte Beecher, because she was an heiress who wore a working girl’s clothes and toiled harder with the sculptor’s chisel than a day laborer with a pickaxe; Lydia Morrow, not so much because she had a flair for spectacular dresses, Leon Bakst colors and startling jewelry, as because her authorship of half a dozen best sellers had given her almost unlimited means to gratify these vagaries. "Lydia Morrow? I don’t seem to know the name," said Janet. "Lydia Dyson, her maiden name, is the name she writes under." This name Janet knew well enough. It was a familiar name wherever American magazines flourished; even among the Barrs of Brooklyn it was a household fixture. The stupendous fact was that Lydia Dyson’s novels of approximated naughtiness, sensual slush and disembowelled passion, appeared serially and simultaneously in magazines with as different a clientele as the _Saturday Morning Post_, the _Purple Book_, _Anybody’s_ and the _Women’s Bazaar_. Claude added that he had his own reasons for calling the two young women freaks. "All these people are loony on the subject of love," he said, with a wave of the hand that appeared to include the whole membership of the ball. "Some because they’ve had too much of it, but more because they’ve had too little. Mazie is one of a small group that is suffering from surfeit. But Charlotte and Lydia belong to the other class. Charlotte wants a husband without a whole lot of love, and Lydia wants a whole lot of love without a husband. As for Mazie, there’s nothing left for her to want but a rich protector, with as little love in the bargain as possible." This offhand analysis set Janet to wondering what Claude’s own conception of love might be. He went blithely on: "The difficulty with Charlotte is that she’s too particular; with Lydia, that she’s not particular enough. Not one-tenth particular enough for Gordon Morrow, her husband, who lives on her money but won’t be kept in his place. He actually presumes to be furiously jealous. But, however comic a figure he may cut, who can blame him for drawing the line at a blackguard like Hutchins Burley? Here’s Hutch staggering this way, now. After you, the impudent beggar!" Naturally, in this quarter, Burley had little luck. Janet shrank away from him, and Claude froze him off as he had already done two or three times that night. Envenomed, but nothing daunted, Hutchins Burley careered, none too steadily, over to the circle around the sculptress. Claude watched him disgustedly.