"Like a bally nipper! Quite. Ridin', wrestlin', boxin', boatin', fightin'--wherever she might be duly confident of victory--jumpin', runnin', skatin', skeein', golfin', gamblin'--er----" "No sex at all?" "Had she any the little dear must have wrestled with it long ago and lost." "Ah," said the American, "that would account for her sang Freud." "O, indeed, I assure you, cold as a fish." "She probably feels the void?" "Sir?" "Figures the hot sands of the desert may warm her up a bit." "Frapjous! And yet you see, she goes alone! What in the world her idea is I'm sure I--_look_--there's young Butternut after her now! A good lad but not, I think, quite clear above. Really you know he can't be. For surely must he know that all Verbeena inherited from her father was the pistol Sir John shot himself with. Although, of course, she shares with her brother, Tawdry, the same damned haughty luck at bridge. These two things and a sterling uppercut is all she owns and yet he would marry her!" "You'd think he'd have a Butternut," said the American shamelessly, although, after due explanation, the Englishman broke into hilarious laughter. "You mean, he hadn't best? I quite agree with you." They stood with looks of mild intelligence on their cosmopolitanly caustic countenances at Lord Tawdry and his sister, Verbeena, as they sat predominantly on the platform of the ballroom acting as host and hostess with tremendous _haute monde de flair_. Lord Tawdry was six feet two in height, though seated, and half a foot wide and he wore an eight-pound black mustache to show that regardless of Verbeena's curiously trained character, there was nothing ambisextrous about himself. His courtesy was so inbred that he kept looking the company over as if he wished they'd all go home and let him go to bed. His sleek head would drop forward sleepily from time to time but always bob up like the balloon it possibly perhaps was maybe. The distinguished nobleman was, moreover, an awful tramp at wearing a monocle. It was dropping out of his eye every few minutes keeping six servants busy catching it and putting it back. Frequently they took a mean advantage and slapped it back. Verbeena, you betcher, was different from her brother despite all that had otherwise been done for and to her. Anybody could see she was violently alive, that she had verve to the crescendo of the fluorescent. [Illustration: LORD TAWDRY, FROM A PORTRAIT BY HEVVINS IN THE ANCESTRAL CASTLE AT MAYONNAISE-ON-LETTYS.] Strangely enough, she was smaller than her brother. But she had a pair of shoulders did Verbeena and her ball gown revealed the ripple of the steel muscles on her young arms. Straddling her chair on the platform she kicked up her heels in her boyish, athletic manner and snapped a smoking cigarette into the air every once in a while, catching it by the lighted end in her firm, proud, scornful, obstinate, determined, appealing, impulsive, unsatisfied sweet mouth.