Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the formal announcement of her engagement to the young man with the dissentient tailoring effects. The impulse to go and do so now, overmastered her sense of what was due to Comus in the way of explanation. The letter was still in its blank unwritten stage, an unmarshalled sequence of sentences forming in her brain, when she ordered her car and made a hurried but well-thought-out change into her most sumptuously sober afternoon toilette. Suzette, she felt tolerably sure, would still be in the costume that she had worn in the Park that morning, a costume that aimed at elaboration of detail, and was damned with overmuch success. Suzette’s mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with obvious satisfaction. Her daughter’s engagement, she explained, was not so brilliant from the social point of view as a girl of Suzette’s attractions and advantages might have legitimately aspired to, but Egbert was a thoroughly commendable and dependable young man, who would very probably win his way before long to membership of the County Council. “From there, of course, the road would be open to him to higher things.” “Yes,” said Elaine, “he might become an alderman.” “Have you seen their photographs, taken together?” asked Mrs. Brankley, abandoning the subject of Egbert’s prospective career. “No, do show me,” said Elaine, with a flattering show of interest; “I’ve never seen that sort of thing before. It used to be the fashion once for engaged couples to be photographed together, didn’t it?” “It’s _very_ much the fashion now,” said Mrs. Brankley assertively, but some of the complacency had filtered out of her voice. Suzette came into the room, wearing the dress that she had worn in the Park that morning. “Of course, you’ve been hearing all about _the_ engagement from mother,” she cried, and then set to work conscientiously to cover the same ground. “We met at Grindelwald, you know. He always calls me his Ice Maiden because we first got to know each other on the skating rink. Quite romantic, wasn’t it? Then we asked him to tea one day, and we got to be quite friendly. Then he proposed.” “He wasn’t the only one who was smitten with Suzette,” Mrs. Brankley hastened to put in, fearful lest Elaine might suppose that Egbert had had things all his own way. “There was an American millionaire who was quite taken with her, and a Polish count of a very old family. I assure you I felt quite nervous at some of our tea-parties.” Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather alluring reputation among a large circle of untravelled friends as a place where the insolence of birth and wealth was held in precarious check from breaking forth into scenes of savage violence. “My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the sphere of my life enormously,” pursued Suzette.