She was rather breath-taking and radiant. She wore a coral-pink satin gown, very short and narrow. Her pretty feet were shod in pink stockings and satin slippers. Her dainty arms and neck were white and smooth, and her glorious fair hair was held in place by a string of coral beads. There are a good many platitudes that are really staggering facts. "Caught on the rebound," is one. Raymond was more open to certain emotions than he had ever been in his life. He was sore and bruised; he had lost several beliefs in himself--and was completely ignorant of the big thing that had given him new strength. He had had the vision of passion through the wrong lens; he had been blinded by the close range, but he _knew_ what the vision was. In that he had the advantage of poor Joan. His youth cried out for Youth; he wanted what he had all but lost the right to have. But he in no sense just then wanted Nancy; it was what she represented. She was what Mrs. Tweksbury had said, the kind of girl that men enshrine in their souls and never replace even when they gladly accept a substitute. "If only----" and then Raymond's eyes looked queer. He was living over the black hour which he did not realize was the hour of his soul's birth. He'd never have that battle again, he inwardly swore, but that was poor comfort. And then, while talking to Nancy, he grew very gay and light-hearted, like someone who had made a safe passage past the siren's rocks. Not that it mattered, except that one did not want to be shipwrecked. Of course, Raymond knew, he wouldn't forget while he lived, the other thing just past, but it had not wrecked him. After that dinner nothing would have happened if all sorts of pressure had not been brought to bear. Raymond was affectionately inclined to be kind to Mrs. Tweksbury because he knew he had wronged her faith in him, though she would never know; so he accompanied her whenever she beckoned, and she beckoned frequently and always toward Nancy. Then Clive Cameron happened, at the crucial moment, to be on the middle of the stage for the same reasons that Raymond was there. Cameron followed Martin's vigorous beckoning, although he was bored to the limit. He liked Nancy and thought her very beautiful, but Cameron had not enshrined any type of woman--a few men are like that. He knew, because he was young and vital and sane, that he had a shrine, or pedestal, in his make-up and if, at any time, he saw a girl that made him forget, for a moment, the profession that was absorbing him just then, he'd humbly implore her to fill the empty niche and after that he would do the glorifying. But if it pleased his uncle to trot him about, he went with charming grace; and because it did not affect him in the least, he played almost boisterously with Nancy and made her jollier than she had ever been in her life. He made her forget things! Forget The Gap!