"Couldn't you see quite as well without being in it?" "Possibly--but I want to be in it.--Never refuse anything that promises enjoyment if you can accept, is my policy. I'm beginning to follow the line of least resistance--I've reached the age to justify it." "Piffle!" said Pendleton--"you talk like a man of sixty." "I'm thirty-four, which is quite old enough to warrant one in taking things by the smooth handle." "Even Mrs. Emerson?" "Even Mrs. Emerson. Moreover, I want to observe the daughter--and the table is an excellent place." "You want to observe the daughter?" Pendleton inflected. "Sure I do! Isn't there a campaign on to marry her to our old friend Devereux? I want to look her over--and, as I said, I don't know a better place than the table for the display of one's manners and inherent breeding--or the lack of them." "Don't you think that Devereux is competent to judge for himself?" "No one is competent to judge where the heart is involved; but don't think that I shall offer him advice--Lord, no! I only want to see for my own satisfaction--and Miss Emerson is a strikingly handsome girl." "The latter is nearer the truth, I reckon!" laughed Pendleton. "I should think you would have had a surfeit of pretty girls in three years' picking abroad." "I never get surfeited with pretty girls. I'm like the chap in the song--'Oh, you dear delightful women, why, I simply love you all.' That's piffle, too, I suppose." "Not at all," Pendleton observed. "I should call it a simple ebullition of spirits--otherwise plain drunk." "Who--I?" "No--not you--the fellow in the song. There will be a bunch more here, with similar delusions, about--eleven o'clock." They smoked a while in silence, with a bow, now and then, to some one that passed, or a word about some one that arrived or departed. The piazza was filling up with the late comers, and with those from the grill-room. The tables were being set for dinner--rubber-shod waiters flitted about--the tinkle of glasses and the hiss of siphons punctuated the chatter of the crowd. "How many are actually enjoying themselves?" said Pendleton with a wave of his hand to include every one on the piazza. "Possibly half," Burgoyne answered--"the rest are bored to death." "Half!" Pendleton laughed. "There isn't one in ten who wouldn't rather be somewhere else at this moment." "Then there are about a hundred and fifty people who are putting up an amazingly good bluff." "Bluff! What does that signify? Life is made up of bluff. We all are bluffers--it's a game of bluffer and bluffee--with the devil getting the one who is bluffed too often." "You run to over-statements this afternoon!" Burgoyne remarked. "What is the matter; been pinched in the stock market--has some girl given you the mit--or are you letting some fool doctor tinker at you?" "Which do you think it is?"