d more than one matron who recalled pleasantly this
straight up-standing youngster with the cool gray eyes who had come
briefly into their ken the winter before. There were a few fellows he
had known in squadron quarters overseas, home for good now that
demobilization was fairly complete. MacRae danced well. He had the
faculty of making himself agreeable without effort. He found it pleasant
to fall into the way of these careless, well-dressed folk whose greatest
labor seemed to be in amusing themselves, to keep life from seeming
"slow." Buttressed by revenues derived from substantial sources, mines,
timber, coastal fisheries, land, established industries, these sons and
daughters of the pioneers, many but one degree removed from pioneering
uncouthness, were patterning their lives upon the plan of equivalent
classes in older regions. If it takes six generations in Europe to make
a gentleman, western America quite casually dispenses with five, and the
resulting product seldom suffers by comparison.

As the well-to-do in Europe flung themselves into revelry with the
signing of the armistice, so did they here. Four years of war had corked
the bottle of gayety. The young men were all overseas. Life was a little
too cloudy during that period to be gay. Shadows hung over too many
homes. But that was past. They had pulled the cork and thrown it away,
one would think. Pleasure was king, to be served with light abandon.

It was a fairly vigorous place, MacRae discovered. He liked it, gave
himself up to it gladly,--for a while. It involved no mental effort.
These people seldom spoke of money, or of work, or politics, the high
cost of living, international affairs. If they did it was jocularly,
sketchily, as matters of no importance. Their talk ran upon dances,
clothes, motoring, sports indoors and afield, on food,--and sometimes
genially on drink, since the dry wave had not yet drained their cellars.

MacRae floated with this tide. But he was not wholly carried away with
it. He began to view it impersonally, to wonder if it were the real
thing, if this was what inspired men to plot and scheme and struggle
laboriously for money, or if it were just the froth on the surface of
realities which he could not quite grasp. He couldn't say. There was a
dash and glitter about it that charmed him. He could warm and thrill to
the beauty of a Granada ballroom, music that seduced a man's feet,
beauty of silk and satin, of face and figure, of b