dozen good friends and neighbors lingered for tea. The women, sunk
in deep chairs about the blazing logs in the immense fireplace,
gossiped in low tones together, punctuating their talk with an
occasional burst of soft laughter. The men watched teacups, adding
an occasional comment to the talk, but listening in silence for
the most part, their amused eyes on the women's interested faces.

Here was a representative group, ranging in age from old Peter
Pomeroy, who had been one of the club's founders twelve years ago,
and at sixty was one of its prominent members to-day, to lovely
Vivian Sartoris, a demure, baby-faced little blonde of eighteen,
who might be confidently expected to make a brilliant match in a
year or two. Peter, slim, hard, gray-haired and leaden-skinned,
well-groomed and irreproachably dressed, was discussing a
cotillion with Mrs. Sartoris, a stout, florid little woman who was
only twice her daughter's age. Mrs. Sartoris really did look young
to be the mother of a popular debutante; she rode and played golf
and tennis as briskly as ever; it was her pose to bring up the
subject of age at all times, and to threaten Vivian with terrible
penalties if she dared marry before her mother was forty at least.

Old Peter Pomeroy, who had a shrewd and disillusioned gray eye,
thought, as everyone else thought, that Mrs. Sartoris was an
empty-headed little fool, but he rarely talked to a woman who was
anything else, and no woman ever thought him anything but markedly
courteous and gallant. He was old now, rich, unmarried, quite
alone in the world. For forty years he had kept all the women of
his acquaintance speculating as to his plans; marriageable women
especially--perhaps fifty of them--had been able in all
maidenliness to indicate to him that they might easily be