miserable incompetence of the pastry-cooks of these
later times, winding up by thanking Hood heartily for his protest. She
was from Boston, she announced, and the declining intellectual life of
that city she attributed to the deterioration of its pie.

Hood rose and gravely replied in a speech of five minutes, much to the
delight of two girls at the old lady's table. Hood wrote his name on the
menu card, and bade the giggling waitress hand it to the lady from
Boston. Her young companions conferred for a moment, and then sent back a
card on which appeared these names neatly pencilled:

Maid Marian
The Queen of Sheba
The Duchess of Suffolk (Mass.)

"My dear boy," Hood remarked to Deering after he had bowed elaborately to
the trio, "I tell you the whole world's caught step with us! That lady
and her two nieces, or granddaughters as the case may be, are under the
spell, just as you and I are and Cassowary and your Pierrette and Babette
of the bungalow. If only you could yield yourself to the May spirit, how
happy we might be! Just think of Cassowary; worth a million dollars and
eating his lunch with the chauffeurs somewhere below stairs and picking
up much information that he will impart to me later! What a bully world
this would be if all mankind followed my system: stupid conventions all
broken-down; the god of mirth holding his sides as he contemplates the
world at play! You may be sure that old lady is a stickler for the
proprieties when she's at home; widow of a bishop most likely. Those
girls have been carefully reared, you can see that, but full of the
spirit of mischief. The moment I tackled that stupid innkeeper about his
monstrous pie they felt the drawing of the mystic tie that binds us
together with silken cords. Very likely they, like us, are in search of
adventure, and if our own affairs were less urgent I should certainly
cultivate their further acquaintance."

The lady who called herself the Duchess of Suffolk (Mass.) was
undoubtedly a person of consequence and the possessor of a delightful
humor. Deering assumed that she and her companions were abroad upon a
lark of some kind and were enjoying themselves tremendously. Hood's spell
renewed its grip upon him. It occurred to him that the whole world might
have been touched with the May madness, and that the old order of things
had passed forever. It seemed ages since he had watched the ticker in