l, doing his best to compel her notice. Her glance did linger
on his for a moment before it moved on indifferently, but in that brief
interval he experienced a curious ripple along his nerves . . . almost
a note of warning. . . . They were very dark gray eyes, Greek in the
curve of the lid, and inconceivably wise, cold, disillusioned. She did
not look a day over twenty-eight. There were no marks of dissipation
on her face. But for its cold regularity she would have looked
younger--with her eyes closed. The eyes seemed to gaze down out of an
infinitely remote past.

Suddenly she seemed to sense the concentrated attention of the
audience. She swept it with a hasty glance, evidently appreciated the
fact that she alone was standing and facing it, colored slightly and
sat down. But her repose was absolute. She made no little embarrassed
gestures as another woman would have done. She did not even affect to
read her program.

II

Clavering left his chair and wandered up the aisle. He felt none of
his usual impatience for the beneficent cigarette. Was he hit?
Hardly. Inquisitive, certainly. But he had seen so many provocative
shells. Vile trick of nature, that--poverty-stricken unoriginal
creature that she was.

He glanced over the rows of people as he passed. It was not the play
that was animating them. The woman was a godsend.

His gaze paused abruptly on the face of Mr. Charles Dinwiddie.
Clavering's grand-aunt had married Mr. Dinwiddie's father and the two
men, so far apart in years, were more or less intimate; the older man's
inexhaustible gossip of New York Society amused Clavering, who in turn
had initiated Mr. Dinwiddie into new and strange pleasures, including
literary parties and first nights--ignored by the world of fashion.

All New York men of the old regime, no matter what their individuality
may have been twenty years earlier, look so much alike as they approach
sixty, and more particularly after they have passed it, that they might
be brothers in blood as in caste. Their moustaches and what little
hair they have left turns the same shade of well-bred white. Their
fine old Nordic faces are generally lean and flat of cheek, their
expression calm, assured, not always smug. They are impeccably groomed
and erect. Stout they may be, but seldom fat, and if not always
handsome, they are polished, distinguished, aloof. They no longer wear
side-whiskers and look younger than their father