fillies, she believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of
a complete lack of parental discipline and school training. They ran
amuck, advertised by the press and applauded by the hawks who
pounced upon their wallets. They were more to be pitied than
condemned, far more foolish and ridiculous than decadent. They were
not unique, either, or peculiar to their own country. Every nation
possessed its "smart set," its little group of men and women who
were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even the war and its iron
tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In her particularly sane
way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, was proud to know that
the majority of the people who formed American society were fine and
sound and generous, and kept as much as possible out of the way of
those others whose one object in life was to outrage the
conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeing her
husband and her friend about together night after night that she
found herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long her
optimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot
of clay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.

It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise and
utterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments of
Cannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate
house, a faithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the
Avenue Wagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.

They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over
twenty, the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room
hung with French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged
gilt chairs and tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing,
with all the gravity and imitative genius of little girls in a