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