It was becoming very rapidly a dubiously mixed affair; Bacchus, with his noisy crew, invaded the supper-room and pronounced Cleland’s snub-nosed, button-eyed goddess "tray chick," and there arose immediately a terrific tumult around her—gods and satyrs doing battle for her; but she persisted in her capricious fancy for Cleland. He, however, remained in two minds; one was to abandon Button-eyes, retire and find Stephanie again, in spite of the ever-smoldering resentment he felt for Grismer; the other was to teach himself without loss of time to keep away from her; school himself to do without her; preoccupy himself casually and recklessly with anything that might aid in obliterating his desire for her companionship—with this snub-nosed one, for example. The desire to see Stephanie remained, nevertheless, sometimes fiercely importunate, sometimes sullenly persistent—seemingly out of all proportion to any sentiment he had ever admittedly entertained for her—out of proportion, also, to his sulky resentment at the folly she had committed with Oswald Grismer. For, after all, if she ultimately married Grismer in the orthodox way her eccentric pre-nuptial behaviour was nothing more serious than eccentric. And if she didn’t, then it meant annulment or divorce; and he realised that nobody outside of the provinces paid any attention to such episodes nowadays. And nobody cared what clod-hoppers thought about anything. His button-eyed goddess had a pretty good soprano voice and she was using it now, persuaded into a duet by Belter. Cleland looked at her sideways without enthusiasm, undecided, irritated and gloomy. She was Broadway vulgarity personified. Badger Spink dropped onto a chair on the other side of him: "Who’s your transparent lady friend?" he inquired lazily. "She looks like a gutter-angel. Who is the depraved little beast?" "I don’t know—some actress, I believe—Sonia something-or-other. Do you want her?" "Thanks. What does she represent? A Kewpie behind a pane of glass?" "She’s a goddess of sorts, I believe. This is getting rather raw, isn’t it, Spink?" Spink yawned and gazed leisurely about him, the satyr’s horn emerging from his thick, wavy pompadour hair, accentuating his clever, saturnine features. His expression was slightly Satanic always. "Yes," he said, "it’s turning out rather rough. What do you think of this sort of thing in New York, Cleland? We’re drifting toward Babylon. That’s the trend since the dance craze swept this moral nation off its moral feet into a million tango joints." "There’s something the matter with us, that’s sure," said Cleland. "This sort of thing doesn’t belong in the new world."