"Oh, you don't have to know people well to ask 'em to parties," explained the other innocently. "And once they eat with you, they're your friends." "That depends upon what you give them to eat!" interjected the Major, chuckling. It seemed a primitive conception of social relationships, but not on the whole a false one. Joan thought of the Arab and his salt.... "Food," she wrote to Stefan Nikolai, "appears to be the Tie that Binds." "What about drink?" he inquired on a post-card. (They did a good deal of this staccato correspondence, Joan liking to exchange deep thoughts with him, as she expressed it, "while they were hot.") "Drink," she replied on another, "is the Tie that Loosens!..." Stefan Nikolai was the only one of her friends with whom she had found courage to discuss her father's marriage. Writing things out to him was almost like writing them out to herself. It served somehow to clear her mind. It is probable that Mr. Nikolai, a student of various phases of the human problem, got a good deal of valuable vicarious experience out of young Joan's letters. Certainly he encouraged them. It was to him that she confided her discovery that social life is far more pleasing after dinner than before. She was learning to count, as surely as does many an experienced hostess, upon the help of the Tie that Loosens. While she herself had not as yet developed her father's palate for cocktails and fine vintages she appreciated their effect upon her partners--for to her men so far were merely partners. It was after dinner that Joan's part of the evening began. Then, thanks to the Tie that Loosens, there was no longer need to make banal conversation nor to listen to it, no need to pretend friendly interest in young men to whom she was incurably a stranger, no need of anything but to yield herself to the music and the first pair of arms that offered, and float away into Dreamland. There was something curiously sensuous to Joan about dancing. It acted like a drug upon her fancy, stimulating, soothing. She was hardly aware of whom she danced with, if he could dance. If he could not, she stopped. This odd impersonality of hers was rather piquant to her partners. Many a youth who was afraid to talk to "that quiet Darcy girl--you never know what she's thinking about!"--was not afraid to dance with her, whenever he got the chance. At such times Joan had her rare moments of beauty. With flushed face, loosened hair, and wide, dreaming eyes, she was as graceful as one of the three circling maidens in the Primavera--the one who looks wistfully over her shoulder at the oblivious youth. Unfortunately her lot was cast among people who did not think in terms of Botticelli. Her step-mother wondered sometimes whether curling-tongs and perhaps a little rouge would make her look more like other girls....