Bertram struggling to compose his face, Eleanor wearing her old air of sweet inscrutability, they faced the quick, perceiving glance of Kate Waddington who sat pouring tea from the crack between two shell bowls. Eleanor settled herself on the teak-wood stool. "You _must_ come out on the balcony before we go," she cried. "I never saw the city lights so wonderful." "Well," said Kate, "it all depends on the company!" CHAPTER X Kate's plump and inert mother, who always regarded this daughter of hers somewhat as a cuckoo in the nest, was in a complaining mood this morning. She sat in her dressing-gown embroidering peonies on a lambrequin and aired her grievances. Kate, writing notes at the old-fashioned black walnut writing desk, looked up at the climaxes of her mother's address, bit her pen and frowned over her shoulder. For the greater part of the time, however, Mrs. Waddington spoke to empty air. "I never did see such a daughter," said Mrs. Waddington, jabbing with her scissors at a loose end of pink silk. "As if it isn't enough, gallivanting around the way you do, fairly living in other people's houses, never bringing any company home, but you can't even be decently civil when you _are_ at home. We might just as well be a hotel for all the respect you pay us. What are you doing when you're away, I'd like to know? It's all well enough, the stories you tell--" Kate, resting between notes, saw fit to parry this last thrust. "I've always supposed I was capable of taking care of myself," she said. "At any rate, you've let me proceed on that theory." It needed only the slightest flutter of an opponent's rapier to throw Mrs. Waddington on the defensive. "You never let me," she mourned. "Goodness knows, I gave you every chance to take me along. When first you began going with those painter people, you might have counted me in." "You didn't seem eager, perceptibly, until I had made my own way," Kate vouchsafed. At that moment the telephone rang. While Kate was in the house, no one else thought of answering the telephone. Mrs. Waddington would have been the last to usurp the prerogative. For that instrument was the tap root of her spy system over her daughter. By it, she picked up things; learned what this irresponsible responsibility of hers was doing. Mrs. Waddington had her mental lists of Kate's telephonic friends. She imagined that she could tell, by the tone of her daughter's voice, just who was on the other end of the line. "Oh, Bert Chester!" came Kate's voice from the hall. Mrs. Waddington made note number one. This mention of the name was significant. The discreet Kate, who knew her mother's habits, hardly ever called names over the wire. A pause for a very short reply, and then: "Certainly. Zinkand at one. I'm beginning to think it's time I worked at my job as confidant. What is the use of a confidant if you don't confide?"