The sophisticated Christine, no longer in the first flush of giddy youth, still unmarried after four enterprising years, was surprised into looking with very real interest at the girl who had been until that moment merely a hostess. Her extreme finish, her unself-conscious confidence and intrepidity, her unassumed lightness of temper were not often found in one so young and apparently virginal. She dismissed as unbelievable the story that this girl had been brought up in the country in an atmosphere of early Victorianism. She had obviously just come from one of those elaborate finishing schools in which the daughters of rich people are turned into hothouse plants by sycophants and parasites and sent out into the world the most perfect specimens of superautocracy, to patronize their parents, scoff at discipline, ignore duty and demand the sort of luxury that brought Rome to its fall. With admiration and amusement she watched her say good-by to one woman after another as the various tables broke up. It really gave her quite a moment to see the way in which Joan gave as careless and unawed a hand to Mrs. Alan Hosack and Mrs. Cooper Jekyll as to the Countess Palotta, who had nothing but pride to rattle in her little bag; and when finally she too drove away, it was with the uneasy sense of dissatisfaction that goes with the dramatic critic from a production in which he has honestly to confess that there is something new--and arresting. Alice Palgrave stayed behind. She felt a natural proprietary interest in the success of the afternoon. "My dear," she said emotionally, "you're perfectly wonderful!" "I am? Why?" "To any other just-married girl this would have been an ordeal, a nerve-wrecking event. But you've been as cool as a fish--I've been watching you. You might have been brought up in a vice-regal lodge and hobnobbed all your life with ambassadors. How do you do it?" Joan laughed and threw out her arms. "Oh, I don't know," she said, with her eyes dancing and her nostrils extended. "I don't stop to think how to do things. I just do them. These people are young and alive, and it's good to be among them. I work off some of my own vitality on them and get recharged at the sound of their chatter. People, people--give me people and the clash of tongues and the sense of movement. I don't much care who they are. I shall pick up all the little snobbish stuff sooner or later, of course, and talk about the right set and all that, as you do. I'm bound to. At present everything's new and exciting, and I'm whipping it up. You wait a little. I'll cut out some of the dull and pompous when I've got things going, and limit myself to red-blooded speed-breakers. Give me time, Alice." She sat down at the piano and crashed out a fox-trot that was all over town. No one would have imagined from her freshness and vivacity that she had been dancing until daylight every night that week.