aid one of the other girls, delightedly.

"Yes," said Blanche. "The elderly party from the rural districts, who
talks to us about the domestic virtues of the wife of his youth."

"Thinks women should cruise with a broom at their mast-heads, like
Admiral somebody in England," said another damsel, who was rolling a
cigarette for a midshipman.

"You see we do not follow the English style," said the smooth hostess
to Philip. "Ladies retiring after dinner! After all, it is a coarse
practice. You agree with me, Mr. Malbone?"

"Speak your mind," said Blanche, coolly. "Don't say yes if you'd rather
not. Because we find a thing a bore, you've no call to say so."

"I always say," continued the matron, "that the presence of woman is
needed as a refining influence."

Malbone looked round for the refining influences. Blanche was tilted
back in her chair, with one foot on the rung of the chair before her,
resuming a loud-toned discourse with Count Posen as to his projected
work on American society. She was trying to extort a promise that she
should appear in its pages, which, as we all remember, she did. One
of her attendant nymphs sat leaning her elbows on the table, "talking
horse" with a gentleman who had an undoubted professional claim to a
knowledge of that commodity. Another, having finished her manufactured
cigarette, was making the grinning midshipman open his lips wider and
wider to receive it. Mrs. Ingleside was talking in her mincing way with
a Jew broker, whose English was as imperfect as his morals, and who
needed nothing to make him a millionnaire but a turn of bad luck for
somebody else. Half the men in the room would have felt quite ill at
ease in any circle of refined women, but there was not one who did not
feel perfectly unembarrassed around Mrs. Ingleside's board.

"Upon my word," thought Malbone, "I never fancied the English
after-dinner practice, any more than did Napoleon. But if this goes on,
it is the gentlemen who ought to withdraw. Cannot somebody lead the way
to the drawing-room, and leave the ladies to finish their cigars?"

Till now he had hardly dared to look at Emilia. He saw with a thrill of
love that she was the one person in the room who appeared out of place
or ill at ease. She did not glance at him, but held her cigarette in
silence and refused to light it. She had boasted to him once of having
learned to smoke at school.

"What's the matter, Emmy?" suddenly exclaimed Blanche. "Are you un