The girls who were to be debutantes that season, the "crowd" or (more accurately to quote Madeleine Hollister's racy characterization) "the gang," stood before Hallam's drug store, chattering like a group of bright-colored paroquets. They had finished three or four ice-cream sodas apiece, and now, inimitably unconscious that they were on the street corner, they were "getting up" a matinee party for the performance of the popular actress whom, at that time, it was the fashion for all girls of their age and condition to adore. They had worked themselves up to a state of hysteric excitement over the prospect. A tall brown-eyed blonde, with the physical development of a woman and the facial expression of a child of twelve, cried out, "I feel as though I should swoon for joy to see that darling way she holds her hands when the leading man's making love to her--so sort of helpless--like this--" "Oh, Madeleine, that's not a _bit_ the way. It's so!" The first speaker protested, "Well, I guess I ought to be able to do it. I've practiced for _hours_ in front of the glass doing it." "For mercy's sake that's nothing. So have I. Who hasn't?" Madeleine referred the question to Lydia, "Lyd has seen her later than anybody. She saw her in London. Just think of going to the theater in London--as if it was anywhere. She says they're crazy about her over there." "_Oh, wild!_" Lydia told them. "Her picture's in every single window!" "Which one? Which one?" they clamored, hanging on her answer breathlessly. "That fascinating one with the rose, where she's holding her head sideways and--" Oh, yes, they had that one, their exclamation cut her short, relieved that their collections were complete. "Lyd met a woman on the steamer coming back whose sister-in-law has the same hairdresser," Madeleine went on. They were electrified. "Oh, _honestly_? Is it her own?" They trembled visibly before solution of a problem which had puzzled them, as they would have said, "for eternities." "Every hair," Lydia affirmed, "and naturally that color." Their enthusiasm was prodigious, "How grand! How perfectly grand!" They turned on Lydia with reproaches. "Here you've been back two months and we haven't got a bit of good out of you. Think of your having known that, all this--" "Her mother's sick, you know," Madeleine Hollister explained. "She hasn't been so sick but what Lydia could get out to go buggy-riding with your brother Paul ever since he got back this last time." Lydia, as though she wished to lose herself, had been entering with a feverish intensity into the spirit of their lively chatter; but now, instead of responding with some prompt, defensive flippancy, she colored high and was silent. A clock above them struck five. "Oh, I must get on," she cried; "I'm down here, you know, to walk home with Father." They laughed loudly, "Oh, yes, we know all about this sudden enthusiasm for Poppa's society. Where are you going to meet Paul?"