th the huge fur collar, with his patent shoes with their
white tops, with his bright waistcoat, his single eyeglass, his shining
silk hat and, above all, by the gay foreign face, its waxed moustache
and its sparkling dark eyes.

Dearborn wrapped his dressing-gown modestly around him to conceal his
shirtless, collarless condition. Running his hands through dishevelled
red hair, he responded--

"No, I don't agree with you. I guess your feminine psychology is at
fault there, Count."

"_Rreally_ not," murmured the Count, looking at him eagerly.

"Mr. Dearborn is a playwright," said Antony. "He is a great student of
character."

Potowski waved his hand in its light glove. "You write plays, Monsieur?
You shall write me a libretto. I have been looking for ever for some one
to write the words for a _hopera_ I am making."

Dearborn nodded. "Far from being all alike, I don't think that there
have been two women alike since Eve."

"_Rreally!_"

Potowski looked at the red-headed man as if he wondered whether he had
met and known all women.

"You find it so, Monsieur? Now I have been married three times. Every
one of them were lovely women. I find them all the same."

"You must have a very adaptable, assimilating and modifying nature,"
said Dearborn, smiling.

"Modifying? What is that?" asked the Pole sweetly.

Neither of the young men made excuses for the icy cold room. They were
too proud. They had nothing to offer Potowski, not even a cigarette, but
the Pole forced his cigar-case upon them, telling them that he made his
cigarettes with a machine by the thousand.

"My wife, Contessa Potowski, makes them, I mean. I do myself the
pleasure to send you a box. They're contraband. You will be arrested if
the police knows so."

"That," said Dearborn, "would really disappoint the tailor. I think he
would like to get in his own score first. But I would rather go to
prison as a contrabander than as a debtor."

They sat on the sofa together and smoked, their breath white in the cold
room. But the amiable Potowski beamed on them, and Antony saw Dearborn's
delight at the outside element. And Dearborn sketched his scenario, the
colour hot in his thin cheeks, and Potowski, rubbing his hands to warm
them, hummed airs from his own opera in a heavenly voice, and the voice
and the enthusiasm magnetized poor Dearborn, carried out of his rut, and
before he knew it he had promised to write a libretto for "Fiametta."

Whilst they ta