A blank silence greeted this last remark. Men looked from one to the other. Once in a while there might have been a cynical smile or sneer that passed. After he had spoken for an hour, perhaps more than an hour, and had answered all such questions as they asked him, David Joslin sat down. A voice in the back part of the room arose. “What’s the matter with Jimmy Haddon?” A vociferous chorus answered. Joslin did not understand the methods of these men, but vaguely he gathered that what he had said had been well received. On the whole he felt content. Now, he said to himself, on the very next day he would go about his own business. He would leave this place, which confused him so much. He was done with the city now. He had done his duty. But this did not by any means close the entertainment of the evening as these men conceived it. As they had been revelers and again business men, so now once more they laid aside the habit of affairs and turned again to the business of banqueting. Waiters came quickly and filled up glasses, large glasses, with bubbling wine. Again mingling voices arose, laughter, jests. The glasses were filled again, and yet again. The business of the day was over. Joy was to be more unconfined. Men drew back curtains at the head of the hall, revealing a little platform where stood a piano, which was wheeled into place. At a signal from Haddon there entered an orchestra of foreign sort, and they mingled music and jangling discord of the usual kind, perhaps among other things a melody or so of the hour; for voices arose, and sounds of hands and feet keeping time. A basso, very knock-kneed and small of chin, appeared from some unknown region, sang a solo, bowed and disappeared. A quartet of negro singers furnished rather better entertainment, so it seemed. And then men began to push back their chairs, so that they might easily see the entrance of the room. All at once a round of general and vociferous applause arose. Jimmy Haddon arose and hastened to greet the latest comers. There stood in the doorway two young women, dressed with a certain similarity, their long cloaks held together by clasps, their arms in long white gloves. There were two, but there might as well have been but one, for the older of the concert team of Pendleton and Stanton—Pollie Pendleton and Nina Stanton, known in every theater of the land that year—lacked so much of the charm of her companion that she quite resigned herself to the amiable role of foil. They were young women of that sort known in Babylon and Boston. Whence they come, who shall say? Whither they go, who knows—the young women of the world, the beloved and the forgotten. The world has always had them, and perhaps will always have them—young, splendidly beautiful, splendidly alluring—who come from none knows whence, and who go no one knows whither.