are mine as well as anybody, because she stood right alongside of me
when I handed them over to mother. Not that I care.... It's the
principle of the thing!"

Claire felt disappointed in the pendants. They seemed so
insignificant--to fall very far short of her mother's passionate
description of them, and she began to wonder which was the more
pathetic, Mrs. Robson's exaggerated notion of their worth or the
pettiness that gave Aunt Julia the tenacity to hold fast to such trivial
baubles.

Ned Stillman was in the audience, also. Claire saw him sitting off at
the side. Indeed, she spotted him on the very moment of her entrance
upon the stage. She had been nervous until his friendly smile warmed her
into easy confidence; and though, while she played, her back had been
toward him, she felt the glow of his sympathy. As Lily Condor and she
swept back upon the stage for their rather perfunctory applause, and
still more perfunctory bouquets provided by the committee, Claire could
see him gently tapping his hands in her direction, and she was surprised
when the usher handed her a bouquet of dazzling orchids.

"They must be for you," Claire said, innocently enough, to Mrs. Condor.
"I don't find any name on them."

"That shows that you've got a discreet admirer, at any rate," Lily
Condor returned with that bantering sneer which Claire was just
beginning to notice. And the thought struck her at once that Stillman
had sent the flowers. She was pleased, but also a little annoyed to
think he had so deliberately ignored Mrs. Condor.

The Flints were there, too; Flint looked uncomfortable and warm in his
scant full-dress suit and his wife frankly ridiculous in a low-cut gown
that exhibited every angle of a hopelessly scrawny neck. Claire did not
see them until she was leaving the stage, and she smiled as she saw
Flint lean over and pick up the opera-glasses from his wife's lap. But
this was not all. In a far corner sat Miss Munch and her cousin, Mrs.
Richards, their ferret eyes darting busily about and their tongues
clicking even more rapidly. Doubtless Flint had invested in a number of
tickets at the office for business reasons and passed them around for
any of the office force who felt a desire to see society at close range.

Claire had not meant to stay beyond one or two numbers following her own
appearance, but she kept yielding to Mrs. Condor's insistent suggestions
that she "stay for just one more," until she discovered, to h