which favors the survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last
kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been
impossible: eating three-o'clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafes,
talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of
mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a
real moral let-down. But he never realized how wide-spread it was until
he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile
intrigue.

Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint
drums down-stairs . . . they strut and fret in the lobby, taking another
cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then the swinging doors
revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward;
then a table at the Midnight Frolic--of course, mother will be along
there, but she will serve only to make things more secretive and
brilliant as she sits in solitary state at the deserted table and thinks
such entertainments as this are not half so bad as they are painted,
only rather wearying. But the P. D. is in love again . . . it was odd,
wasn't it?--that though there was so much room left in the taxi the
P. D. and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go in
a separate car. Odd! Didn't you notice how flushed the P. D. was when
she arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. "gets away with it."

The "belle" had become the "flirt," the "flirt" had become the "baby
vamp." The "belle" had five or six callers every afternoon. If the
P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable
for the one who hasn't a date with her. The "belle" was surrounded
by a dozen men in the intermissions between dances. Try to find the