Mr. Fontaine was a fastidious man and a stickler for appearances, particularly British appearances. The fashionable set in New York aped English manners, and consequently, the door attendant at Fontaine’s was an English youth and the salesmen in the art departments were Englishmen with consciously superior airs fortified by British university educations, Oxford accents and modish London clothes. A humble art lover on a visit to the galleries might easily have been frightened off by the sumptuous appointments, or overawed by seven or eight swagger young gentlemen who would eloquently ignore him as he crossed their several posts. They might have been so many heirs to dukedoms engaged in a feeble game of passing themselves off as prosaic American commoners. Yet they could pay a very flattering attention to multimillionaires, especially of the feminine gender; and these, as their astute employer knew, they attracted in considerable numbers. Moving in and out among his father’s young men, Claude might readily have passed for one of them. He was like them in the ingratiating, physical appearance that comes from a systematic cultivation of the body, and his accent, if not of an Oxford, was of a Harvard flavor. The only real difference was that he was several degrees less arrogant—not that humility was one of his specialties, by any means. *II* About ten days after the Mineola outing he was seated at his desk, opening the morning’s mail. Two letters caught his eye. One, from Marjorie Armstrong, supplemented Mr. Armstrong’s invitation to the two Fontaines to attend a week-end party in the Armstrong’s Long Island home. The other was a note from Cornelia, reading: "Lothario, remember your appointment with us this evening. We shall sup _al fresco_ in the Japanese pagoda on the Lorillard roof—Araminta, Hercules and you will be the guests of honor. Only the chosen few are invited: Lydia, Charlotte, Robert and the invisible Pryor. A special attraction has been provided after supper—if indeed you need an attraction other than the piteous spectacle of Araminta pining away for you. Cornelia. This operatic reminder was much more welcome to Claude than Marjorie’s frigid message. Cornelia’s latest party—parties trod on one another’s heels in the model tenements—was in celebration of Janet’s admission to the society of the Outlaws. Everybody counted on Claude to be the bright particular meteor of the occasion. Yet how was he to follow his natural inclination without offending his father, to say nothing of Colonel Armstrong and Marjorie?