Kate’s glance wandered from Lilla Gates, the most obvious and least interesting of the group, to Nollie Shriner (one of the “awful” Fourteenth Street Shriners); Nollie Shriner first, then Nollie Haverford, wife of a strait-laced Albany Haverford, and now Nollie Tresselton, though she still looked, with her brown squirrel-face and slim little body, like a girl in the schoolroom. Yes, even Nollie seemed to be in a great hurry; one felt her perpetually ordering and sorting and marshalling things in her mind, and the fact, Kate presently perceived, now and then gave an odd worn look of fixity to her uncannily youthful face. Kate wondered when there was ever time to enjoy anything, with that perpetual alarm-clock in one’s breast. Her glance travelled on to her own daughter. Anne seemed eager too, but not at such a pace, or about such a multiplicity of unrelated things. Perhaps, though, it was only the fact of being taller, statelier--old-fashioned words still fitted Anne--which gave her that air of boyish aloofness. But no; it was the mystery of her eyes--those eyes which, as Kate had told her, she had chosen for herself from some forgotten ancestral treasury into which none of the others had dipped. Between olive and brown, but flecked with golden lights, a little too deep-set, the lower lid flowing up smooth and flat from the cheek, and the black lashes as evenly set as the microscopic plumes in a Peruvian feather-ornament; and above them, too prominent, even threatening, yet melting at times to curves of maiden wonder, the obstinate brows of old Mrs. Clephane. What did those eyes portend? Kate Clephane glanced away, frightened at the riddle, and absorbed herself in the preoccupying fact that the only way to tell the Drovers from the Tresseltons was to remember that the Drovers’ noses were even smaller than the Tresseltons’ (but _would_ that help, if one met one of either tribe alone?). She was roused by hearing Enid Drover question plaintively, as the ladies regained the drawing-room: “But after all, why _shouldn’t_ Anne go too?” The women formed an interrogative group around Mrs. Clephane, who found herself suddenly being scrutinized as if for a verdict. She cast a puzzled glance at Anne, and her daughter slipped an arm through hers but addressed Mrs. Drover. “Go to Madge Glenver’s cabaret-party with Lilla? But there’s no real reason at all why I shouldn’t--except that my preference, like Nollie’s, happens to be for staying at home this evening.” Mrs. Drover heaved a faint sigh of relief, but her daughter, shrugging impatient shoulders out of her too-willing shoulder-straps, grumbled: “Then why doesn’t Aunt Kate come too? You’ll talk her to death if you all stay here all the evening.” Nollie Tresselton smiled. “So much for what Lilla thinks of the charm of our conversation!” Lilla shrugged again. “Not _your_ conversation particularly. I hate talking. I only like noises that don’t mean anything.” “Does that rule out talking--_quite_?”