omply
most scrupulously with the existing rationing regulations. As the
hostess herself said more than once as she moved to and fro in a
flounced white frock having the exaggeratedly low waistline of the sort
of frock which frequently is worn by a tot of tender age, with a wide
blue sash draped about her almost down at her knees, and with fluffy
skirts quite up to her knees, with her hair caught up in a coquettish
blue bow on the side of her head and a diminutive fan tied fast to one
of her wrists with a blue ribbon--so many of the ladies who had attained
to Mrs. Carroway's fairly well-ripened years did go in for these
extremely girlishly little-girly effects--as the hostess thus attired
and moving hither and yon remark, "If Mr. Herbert Hoover himself were
here as one of my guests to-night I am just too perfectly sure he could
find absolutely nothing whatsoever to object to!"

It would have required much stretching of that elastic property, the
human imagination, to conceive of Mr. Herbert Hoover being there,
whether in costume or otherwise, but that was what Mrs. Carroway said
and repeated. Always those to whom she spoke came right out and agreed
with her.

Now it was getting along toward three-thirty o'clock of the morning
after, and the party was breaking up. Indeed for half an hour past, this
person or that had been saying it was time, really, to be thinking about
going--thus voicing a conviction that had formed at a much earlier hour
in the minds of the tenants of the floor below Mrs. Carroway's studio
apartment, which like all properly devised studio apartments was at the
top of the building.

It was all very well to be a true Bohemian, ready to give and take, and
if one lived down round Washington Square one naturally made allowances
for one's neighbours and all that, but half past three o'clock in the
morning was half past three o'clock in the morning, and there was no
getting round that, say what you would. And besides there were some
people who needed a little sleep once in a while even if there were some
other people who seemed to be able to go without any sleep; and finally,
though patience was a virtue, enough of a good thing was enough and too
much was surplusage. Such was the opinion of the tenants one flight
down.

So the party was practically over. Mr. Algernon Leary, of the firm of
Leary & Slack, counsellors and attorneys at law, with offices at Number
Thirty-two Broad Street, was among the very l