At supper Millicent saw to it that they were paired together. Looking distastefully at the noisy tables, where already the customary table-jokes were under way--spoons being laid in rows so that a tap on one sent another into a glass of water, and misappropriation of the salt and pepper (Bardy Cless and Evelyn Preston leading on the humorists), she feared that she might lose him there to Joan Twist. “Let’s go outside and have our supper in a car,” she suggested. “There’s no room here.” Tommy, politely overlooking the numerous empty places, was entirely willing. He got cake and sandwiches, and two plates with cups of coffee and chicken patties, and together they sped across the street to a parked limousine that stood almost in the shadow of the cathedral. He told her, in the course of the next few minutes, that she was _quite_ as lovely as any girl in Richmond. The darkness, and Millicent’s bare shoulder close against him, were effective. And he was pleasantly surprised when he found that she had no desire to be kissed. “Why, I’ve only known you for two hours,” she said, dropping lightly out of the car. “And besides, mother will be mad _again_ when she finds that I’m not having supper at my own party. Last year Dick Cole and I drove down to the chicken shack, and mother almost passed away when we came back, eating drumsticks!” They both forgot the débris of their supper, but later, after the party was over, a very angry matron discovered it when she sat in a plate of chicken, on entering her car to go home. Long past midnight Millicent sat before her dressing table, thinking. She took off the silver band around her hair, and with a brush began to restore the fluffiness which the mode demands. A wisp which grew an infinitesimal fraction of an inch longer, in front, than the rest she critically snipped off with finger-nail scissors. She let her hands rest on the table, and regarded her reflection. She was supremely satisfied with what she saw; she always was. Her self-admiration transcended egotism. It was impersonal. She was complacently certain that she was the most beautiful girl in the city. The assurance of a very few girls--and a very great number of men--was superfluous. Wilde has said that love of oneself is a life-long romance: Millicent’s was a passion! In the perfection of her features, a subtle coldness of manner, a faint expression as of calculating, which her character had betrayed into her eyes, was the nearest thing to a fault which she could see. Such an expression must inevitably creep into the expression of a girl who is the object of so much masculine attention that she may--and perforce must--choose, and weigh, and reject, so slighting the least attractive candidates. It was these who were most aware of the expression--they remembered it vividly, in soothing their disappointments.