"Asleep. He's wretched, poor fellow! Berry Stokes' bachelor
dinner, you know. That crowd is bad for him."

"I KNEW it must have been an orgy!" Miss Vanderwall declared
vivaciously. "That was a silly slip of mine in the car. Billy
doesn't know he went, I suppose?"

"No, he promised her he wouldn't. But everyone was at the dinner.
Some of them came home early, I believe. But it was all kept
quiet, because Aline Pearsall is such a little shrinking violet, I
suppose," Mrs. Breckenridge said. "The Pearsalls are to think it
was just an impromptu affair. Billy and Aline of course have no
idea what a party it was. But Clarence says that poor Berry was
worse than he, and a few of them are still keeping it up. It's a
shame, of course--"

Her uninterested voice dropped into silence.

"Men are queer," Miss Vanderwall said profoundly, busy with ivory-
backed brushes, powders, and pastes.

"The mystery to me--about men," mused Mrs. Breckenridge, her
absent eyes upon the buckled slipper she held in her hand, "is not
that they are as helpless as babies the moment anything goes wrong
with their poor little heads or their poor little tummies, but
that they work so hard, in spite of that, to increase the general
discomfort of living. Women have a great deal of misery to bear,
they are brave or cowardly about it as the case may be, but at
least they endure and renounce and diet and keep early hours--or