s
man interested her. It was a long pale face, the mouth weary,
in the eyes a strange hot fire of intense enthusiasm. He was
young--and old--and neither. Evidently he had lived every
minute of every year of his perhaps forty years. He was
wearing a quiet suit of blue and his necktie was of a darker
shade of the same color. His clothes were draped upon his good
figure with a certain fascinating distinction. He was smoking
an unusually long and thick cigarette. The slender strong
white hand he raised and lowered was the hand of an artist. He
might be a bad man, a very bad man--his face had an expression
of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as
conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however
bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind
of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage
at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of
conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes--and
he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and
manner. The woman with him evidently wished to convince him
that she loved him, to convince those about her that they were
lovers; the man evidently knew exactly what she had in
mind--for he was polite, attentive, indifferent, and--Susan
suspected--secretly amused.

Susan's escort leaned toward her and said in a low tone, "The
two at the next table--the woman's Mary Rigsdall, the actress,
and the man's Brent, the fellow who writes plays." Then in a
less cautious tone, "What are you drinking?"

"What are _you_ drinking?" asked Susan, still covertly watching Brent.

"You are going to dine with me?"

"I've no engagement."

"Then let's have Martinis--and I'll go get a table and order
dinner while the waiter's bringing them."

When Susan was alone, she gazed round the crowded cafe, at the
scores of interesting faces--thrillingly interesting to her
after her long sojourn among countenances merely expressing
crude elemental appetites if anything at all beyond toil,
anxiety, privation, and bad health. These were the faces of
the triumphant class--of those who had wealth or were getting
it, fame or were striving for it, of those born to or acquiring
position of some sort among the few thousands who lord it over
the millions. These were the people among whom she belonged.
Why was she having such a savage struggle to attain it? Then,
all in an instant the truth she had been so long groping for