Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray she cast up fatally spotted several delicate robes. That would have been of some consolation to Kedzie if she had known it. But all she knew was that she went backward into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than her sorrow. Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, and when she kicked herself erect at last she was half strangled, entirely drenched, and quite blinded. The other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook with sisterly affection. Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward, groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms, and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was automatic. Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that she flung off his hands and snapped, “Quit it, dog on it!” Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult and a suit of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running the gantlet of a hundred ridicules. When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments doubly clinging from being soaked. She was ashamed now, and hid her face in her arm. Charity Coe took pity on her, and before the jealous Charity could check the generous Charity she had stepped forward and thrown about the girl's shoulders a light wrap she carried. She led the child to the other wood-nymphs, and they took her back into the shrubbery. “Wait till you hear what Miss Silsby's gotta say!” said one dryad, and another added: “Woisse than that is this: you know who that was you flang out at so regardless?” “I don't know, and I don't care,” sobbed Kedzie. “You would care if you was wise to who His Nibs was!” “Who was it?” Kedzie gasped. “Jim Dyckman--no less! You was right in his arms, and you hadda go an' biff him.” “Oh, Lord!” sighed Kedzie. “I'll never do.” She was thinking that destiny had tossed her into the very arms of the aristocracy and she had been fool enough to fight her way out. Jim Dyckman, meanwhile, was clambering into his car with clothes and ardor dampened. He was swearing to cut out the whole herd of women. And Charity Coe Cheever was chattering flippantly with a group of the dispersing audience, while her heart was in throes of dismay at her own feelings and Jim Dyckman's. THE SECOND BOOK MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN CHAPTER I The scene was like one of the overcrowded tapestries of the Middle Ages. At the top was the Noxon palace, majestic, serene, self-confident in the correctness of its architecture and not afraid even of the ocean outspread below. The house looked something like Mrs. Noxon at her best. Just now she was at her worst. She stood by her marble pool and glared at her mob of guests dispersing in knots of laughter and indifference. There were hundreds of men and women of all ages and sizes, and almost all of them were startling the summer of 1915 with the fashion-plates of 1916.