Orr.

"Did the spook say anything else?"

Orr was selecting a cigar from a cabinet on wheels which a servant
trundled about. He chose and lighted one before he replied. Then he
looked at Loftus.

"Yes, she told me that she saw--" Orr paused. The cigar had gone out.
He lighted it again. "She told me that she saw death hereabouts."

Loftus was also lighting a cigar. "Then I too am a spook," he replied.
"I foretold that you would say something ghastly."

"But, my dear fellow," Orr rejoined, "truth is always that. People
fancy that it is made of lace and pearls like a girl on her wedding
day. It is not that at all. It is just what you call it. It is
ghastly. Read history. Any reliable work is but a succession of
groans. The more reliable it is the more groans there will be."

Annandale, who had been helping himself to brandy, interrupted.
"Talking of reading things, I saw somewhere that after some dinner or
other, when the women had gone, a chap began on a rather--well, don't
you know, a sort of barnyard story and the host, who could not quite
stomach it, said: 'Suppose we continue the conversation in the
drawing-room?' So, Royal, what do you say? If Orr is going to shock
us, suppose we do."

Loftus with a painted finger-tip flipped the ashes from his cigar.

"I fear that I have lost the ability to be shocked, but not the
ability to be bored."

Yet presently, after another cigar and conscious perhaps that Fanny
Price, though often exasperating, never bored, he returned with his
guests to the drawing-room.

CHAPTER II

THE POCKET VENUS

"How do you like my hat?" said Fanny to Sylvia. Since the dinner a
week had gone. The two girls were in Irving Place.

Irving Place is south of Gramercy Park. To the west are the multiple
atrocities of Union Square, to the east are the nameless shames of
Third avenue. Between the two Irving Place lies, a survival of the
peace of old New York. At the lower end are the encroaching menaces of
trade, but at the upper end, from which you enter Gramercy Park, there
is a quiet, pervasive and almost provincial. It was here that Sylvia
Waldron lived.

People take a house for six months or an apartment for a year and call
it a home. That is a base use for a sacred word. A home is a place in
which you are born, in which your people die and your progeny emerge.
A home predicates the present, but particularly the past and with it
the future. Any other variety of residence may b