During the Outlaws’ Ball, Cornelia sat alone in the Lorillard apartment. Had she dressed for the masquerade she had declined to attend? One might have been pardoned for thinking so. To a piece of black satin, draped around her in sensuous lines, a girdle of tangerine velvet added the sole touch of color. It also served to draw her dress in high above the waist and to bring out the burnished gold of her hair. The fabric was ingeniously held together by pins, Cornelia being an advocate of a mode of dressing or draping that dispensed with sewing as much as possible. One handsome shoulder was bare; and this arrangement detracted nothing from the garment’s look of insecurity. Cornelia’s men friends were apt to be on tenterhooks lest her pinned dresses should suddenly come to pieces. It was an emotion she was not altogether unconscious of, or wholly displeased with. To the very last she had persisted in her refusal to take part in the festivity, and had held out firmly against the friendly blandishments with which Janet, Robert, Mazie, and Hutchins Burley had successively tried to shake her determination. She defended her position by declaring that dancing bored her to distraction, not to mention that the current dance forms, the fox trot, the jazz steps and the glide, seemed to her to be unspeakable profanations of a fine art. With this explanation her friends had to be content, while they guessed at the true reason for her refusal. Claude hazarded the view that her real motive was a dread of emerging in public while her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist, was still fresh in everybody’s memory. Mazie repeated her laconic opinion that Cornelia could spite more people and attract more attention by being missed than by being present. About eleven o’clock some one rang. When Cornelia opened the door, she was confronted by an athletic young man whom she recognized as the occupant of apartment number thirteen, the one next to her own. Mistaking her dress for negligee, he apologized profusely and then explained that the gas in his room having suddenly given out he needed a twenty-five-cent piece to set the meter in action again. Cornelia observed that whereas his form was the form of the roaring lion, his voice was the voice of the cooing dove. "I always keep an extra quarter on the mantelpiece," he said, coloring with embarrassment, "but the light went down all of a sudden, and in the dark I couldn’t locate the pesky coin." Cornelia hastened to get the necessary money. Returning, she sympathized with him upon the fickleness of quarter meters. "Horrid, mercenary things! I’d give them ’no quarter,’ if I dared, wouldn’t you?" "Yes—the light always goes out in the dark," he said, quaintly. He was obviously anxious to make a good impression, and ill at ease because of this anxiety. "Just wait a second, will you, Miss," he said, as she handed him the money. "I’ll give it back right away."