quite remember at the moment just where he got hold of any of them. This
evening he has been making an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the
youngest Harvard playwright to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite,
impeccably correct from his club tie to the small gold animal on his
watch-chain, is almost coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San
Francisco cartoonist to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to
New York that no matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds
himself buried under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse
or Foyot's has the best _hors-d'oeuvres_ in Paris.

The conflict is taking place across Johnny's knees, both of which are
being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like a
sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he is quite
content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the country, who,
if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward French and
a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty failings of
prominent debutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall, the youngest
star of the Provincetown Players out of a prickly silence, employed in
supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated Harlequins
by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future of Eugene
O'Neill.

Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience
overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can be both
human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties instead of
Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny Chipman. Johnny
rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied the very two worms he
was keeping room for to top off breakfast. "Well" he says to the world at
large. "They're only fifteen minutes late apiece this time."