round by the collar to introduce him. Planning a dinner at Martin's
already. Gad, young Peter must have what he wants WHEN he wants it! I
put in a word for you--told him you and I ought to be let in on the
ground floor. Funny the luck some girls have about getting started. I
believe this one'll take if she can manage to shake the Lipscombs. I
think I'll ask to paint her; might be a good thing for the spring show.
She'd show up splendidly as a PENDANT to my Mrs. Van Degen--Blonde and
Brunette... Night and Morning... Of course I prefer Mrs. Van Degen's
type--personally, I MUST have breeding--but as a mere bit of flesh and
blood... hallo, ain't you coming into the club?"

Marvell was not coming into the club, and he drew a long breath of
relief as his companion left him.

Was it possible that he had ever thought leniently of the egregious
Popple? The tone of social omniscience which he had once found so comic
was now as offensive to him as a coarse physical touch. And the worst of
it was that Popple, with the slight exaggeration of a caricature, really
expressed the ideals of the world he frequented. As he spoke of Miss
Spragg, so others at any rate would think of her: almost every one in
Ralph's set would agree that it was luck for a girl from Apex to be
started by Peter Van Degen at a Cafe Martin dinner...

Ralph Marvell, mounting his grandfather's doorstep, looked up at the
symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament, as he
might have looked into a familiar human face.

"They're right,--after all, in some ways they're right," he murmured,
slipping his key into the door.

"They" were his mother and old Mr. Urban Dagonet, both, from Ralph's
earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in
Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner
consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the
question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic
rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by
widely-different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth
Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall,
with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet "Dutch interior" effect of
its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple
called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of
misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell
was built up in Wall