loved? For that moment I think I did love Gladys Todd, for I was
standing to her defence against the crushing weight of millions of
money and the bluest of blood. Yes, I am sure that I should have gone
on and told her all, but Fate, wiser than I, intervened, and the butler
announced Mr. Talcott.

As usual, Mr. Talcott did not wish tea--he had just come from the club,
but he could not see why we were sitting in utter darkness. With
Penelope's assent, he turned a button, showing thereby an exasperating
familiarity with the room, and, seating himself comfortably before her,
expressed his wonder that he had not seen her last night; he had hunted
for her everywhere to join his party at supper. And now the lights
were on and I a mere spectator at the play; I was having a glimpse of
the stage on which I could never move. The lights burned high; they
swept the dust and cobwebs from the diamond panes; they drove the
flames to hiding in the ashes; their touch turned the leaves of the
fireplace to dead stone. But Penelope they could not change. In the
soft black webs, woven for her by a hundred toiling human spiders, she
held still the heritage of the proud woman in frills and furbelows and
the fine old man in wig and smallclothes. She was more radiant, as
though her blood ran quicker in the joy of the part she played. Enter
the butler. Enter Mr. Grant, a tall young man in business clothes, a
good-natured fellow who laughed joyously at nothing. He had just
dropped in on his way home after a beastly day downtown--a horrible
day--a new attack on the trusts and a smash in the market. He fixed
himself close to the curate's delight and beginning at the bottom
worked upward, fortifying himself, as he explained, for a late dinner.
Talcott thought that he had heard Grant say that he was going to the
opera. Grant had never said any such thing. Didn't Mr. Malcolm agree
with him that more than one act of opera was a bore? Mr. Malcolm quite
agreed. Mr. Talcott wondered if Miss Blight had heard that Jerry White
was engaged. Miss Blight was at once dying to know to whom. Mr.
Talcott admonished her to think. Mr. Grant wanted to know if Mr.
Malcolm had heard. But Mr. Malcolm had a strange unappreciation of
important news. He moved in another world than this and he wanted to
flee from it. He was homesick for familiar scenes and faces, for Miss
Minion's and the long table in the basement to which the wizened old
women would s