arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The
dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members:
they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood;
meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living,
their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity
and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together
with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.

An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said--
hardy perennials, Lee thought, in terms Fanny's rather than his, they
were determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare
flowers of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly
giggled persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and
virtue, seemed intent on creating the opposite engaging impression;
they were all seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being
as different from their actual useful fates as possible.

The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually
young, were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there
was hardly one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided
the dinner as a damned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his
stamp of approval on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who
engineered it, the entire society of America, who had invented all the
popular forms of pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of
their charms and the spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace;
and the men came, paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its
resemblance to imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained
about living in a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was
very limited: in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied,
filled life, women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady