Alice didn't blind herself to the fact that in order to gamble, most of the girls in the room would go, without the smallest discrimination, to anybody's house; but there were others,--notably Mrs. Alan Hosack, Mrs. Cooper Jekyll and Enid Ouchterlony,--whose pride it was to draw a hard, relentless line between themselves and every one, however wealthy, who did not belong to families of the same, or almost the same, unquestionable standing as their own. Their presence in the little house in East Sixty-seventh Street gave it, they were well aware, a most enviable cachet and placed Joan safely within the inner circle of New York society--the democratic royal inclosure. It was something to have achieved so soon--little as Joan appeared, in her astonishing coolness, to appreciate it. The Ludlows, as Joan had told Alice with one of her frequent laughs, might have come over in the only staterooms on the ship which towed the heavily laden Mayflower, but that didn't alter the fact that the Hosacks, the Jekylls and the Ouchterlonys were the three most consistently exclusive and difficult families in the country, to know whom all social climbers would joyously mortgage their chances of eternity. Alice placed a feather in her cap accordingly. Joan's table was the first to break up. She was a loser to the tune of seventy dollars, and while she wrote her check to Marie Littlejohn, a tiny blond exotic not much older than herself,--who laid down the law with the ripe authority of a Cabinet Minister and kept to a daily time-table with the unalterable effrontery of a fashionable doctor,--talked over her shoulder to Christine Hurley. "Alice tells me that your brother has gone to France with the Canadian Flying Corps. Aren't you proud of him?" "I suppose so, but it isn't our war, and they're awfully annoyed about it at Piping Rock. He was the crack man of the polo team, you know. I don't see that there was any need of his butting into this European fracas." "I quite agree with you," said Miss Littlejohn, with her eyes on the clock. "I broke my engagement to Metcalfe Hussey because he insisted on going over to join the English regiment his grandfather used to belong to. I've no patience with sentimentality." She took the check and screwed it into a small gold case. "I'm dining with my bandage-rolling aunt and going on to the opera. Thank goodness, the music will drown her war talk. Good-by." She nodded here and there and left, to be driven home with her adipose chow in a Rolls-Royce. Christine Hurley touched a photograph that stood on Joan's desk. "Who's this good-looking person?" she asked. "My husband," said Joan. "Oh, really! When are we to see something of him?" "Oh, I don't know," said Joan. "He's about somewhere." Miss Hurley laughed. "It's like that already, is it? Haven't you only just been married?" "Yes," said Joan lightly, "but we've begun where most people leave off. It's a great saving of time and temper!"