"What is the matter?" his companion said to him at last, in her low, insistent voice. "You are behaving so badly. Why won't you do anything one wants you to?" Sommers glanced at his companion as if she had shaken him out of a dream. Her dark eyes were gleaming with irritation, and her mouth trembled. "I had a vision," Sommers replied coolly. "Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head to catch every syllable of his reply. "I seemed to see things in a flash--to feel an iron crust of prejudice." The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young doctor tried again to phrase the matter. "These people--I mean your comfortable rich--seem to have taken a kind of oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all that," he blundered on. "I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising her head and glancing over the table. "I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks sound 'young' even to me." "I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk business at dinner. It is worse than polo!" She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half lowered, as if to put a barrier between them. "Yes," Sommers assented; "it is harder to understand." It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end. "I hope you will talk with Dr. Lindsay. He is a very able man. And," she hesitated a moment and then looked frankly at him, "he can do so much for a young doctor who has his way to make." "Don't you think that might make it harder for me to talk to him?" Sommers asked, irritated by her lack of tact. The girl's face flushed, and she pressed her lips together as if to push back a sharp reply. "That is unfair. We are going now--but sometime we must talk it out." The men stretched themselves and rearranged their chairs in little groups. Parker Hitchcock, Carson, and young Porter--were talking horses; they made no effort to include the young doctor in their corner. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably stranded in the middle of the long room, when Dr. Lindsay crossed to his side. The talk at dinner had not put the distinguished specialist in a sympathetic light, but the younger man felt grateful for this act of cordiality. They chatted about St. Isidore's, about the medical schools in Chicago, and the medical societies. At last Dr. Lindsay suggested casually, as he refilled his liqueur-glass: "You have made some plans?"