diamonds glistening in her hair like dew. Of the four men, Gilbert
Palgrave, standing where he could be seen, might have been an
illustration by Du Maurier of one of Ouida's impossible guardsmen.
He made the other three, all of the extraordinary ordinary type,
appear fifty per cent, more manly than they really were--the young
old Hosack with his groomlike face and immaculate clothes, the burly
Howard Cannon, who retained a walrus mustache in the face of
persistent chaff, and Noel d'Oyly, who when seen with his Junoesque
wife made the gravest naturalists laugh at the thought of the love
manners of the male and female spider.

Turning her chair round, Alice touched Joan's arm. "Will you do
something for me?" she asked.

Joan looked at her with a smile of disturbing frankness. "It all
depends whether it will upset any of my plans," she said.

"I wouldn't have asked you if I had thought that."

Joan laughed. "You've been studying my character, Alice."

"I did that at school, my dear." Mrs. Palgrave spoke lightly, but it
was plain to see that there was something on her mind. "Don't go out
to supper with Howard Cannon. Come back with me. I want to talk to
you. Will you?"

Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and been
oppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come
from the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a
characteristically dignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert,