“Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking important--that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on the dot. Well--” and Peter rose, scattering sand. “We must obey our social calendar, my prominent young friends--just think how awful it would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and back, Ted.” “You're on,” and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic. Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only been older before the war came along and changed so much. He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists picture post-cards outside the Café de la Paix. Judged by American standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all interior--the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel--and there were two people in it to help out the composition--and the face of one seemed somehow to be rather deathly familiar-- That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could “reform” all the rest of his life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards--and still he wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage. Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly--oh, much too plainly!--and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately. “Oh, Ted!” from Peter next door. “Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of us be late for lunch.” They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's chair. “Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.” Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!” crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!” Oliver flushed. “Don't swipe all my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course. “This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?” Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness, had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the telegram was short.