"First time you've been to one of Sassoon's parties?" asked Winona abruptly. "First time! I'm quite excited!" "You've met him, then?" "No, not yet! I'm going as a chorus girl." "What?" "He's entertaining the sextette of the _Gay Prince_--I'm to replace one. I got the bid through Adèle Vickers--you remember her? She's in the sextette." "Adèle Vickers," said Winona, with a frown. "It's on the quiet, naturally," said Doré, not noticing the expression. "I'm to be taken for a chorus girl, by old Sassoon too--complications, heaps of fun!" "You're crazy! Some one'll recognize you!" "Bah!" "Sassoon doesn't play fair!" said Winona abruptly. "Dangerous?" "He doesn't play the game fair!" repeated Winona, with more insistence. "I like precipices!" said Doré, smiling. "How you express things, Dodo!" "Why? Don't you like 'em?" "Yes, naturally. But with Sassoon--" "It's such fun!" said Doré, shaking her curls. Her companion crossed her fingers and held them up in warning. "Dodo, be careful!" "I'll take care of myself!" said Doré scornfully, and a flash of excitement began to show in the dark blue shadows of her eyes. "Different! Sassoon is on the black list, Dodo!" Albert Edward Sassoon, whom two little Salamanders were thus discussing in a great barn of a room, third floor front of Miss Pim's boarding-house, was the head of the great family of Sassoon, which for three generations had stood, socially and financially, among the first powers of the city. "Thanks for the warning. When you know, you know what to do!" said Doré carelessly. "Just let him try!" The admonition troubled her not at all. She had met and scored others before who in the secret code of the Salamanders were written down unfair. The prospect of such an antagonist brought to her a little more animation. She bolted into a snug-fitting fur toque, brightened by a flight of feathers at the side, green with a touch of red. "There!" she exclaimed merrily. "A bit of the throat, a bit of the ankle, and a slash of red--that's Dodo! What's the time?" "Twenty past. Who's your prop?" "Stacey." "Prop," in the lexicon of the Salamanders, is a term obviously converted from the theatrical "property." A "prop," in Salamanderland, is a youth not too long out of the nest to be rebellious, possessed of an automobile--a _sine qua non_--and agitated by a patriotic craving to counteract the evil effects of the hoarding of gold. Each Salamander of good standing counts from three to a dozen props, carefully broken, kept in a state of expectant gratitude, genii of the telephone waiting a summons to fetch and carry, purchase tickets of all descriptions, lead the way to theater or opera, and, above all, to fill in those blank dates, or deferred engagements, which otherwise might become items of personal expense. At this moment the curly brown head of Ida Summers, of the second floor back, bobbed in and out, saying in a stage whisper: "Black Friday! Beware! The cat's loose--rampaging!"