d him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it.
From a wing-chair Carl searched the room and the people. There were
two paintings--a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under
slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany
escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by
scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the
shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been
reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted--the
latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells's _First and Last
Things_; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap
reprint of _Dodo_.

The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not
dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was
an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering
in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the
room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population,
born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody
and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive
Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure.
She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred
face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one
ever attended except as a matter of conscience.

"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your
opera--and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid
about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy
as he wondered what Ruth had told her.

Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed
boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his
face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray
suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while
talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl
instantly disliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent
sarcasm.

Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with
which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly
on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not
any Mr. Ericson in particular.

Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl
himself was part of a hash-group--an older woman who seemed to know
Rome and Paris better