ad lowered his
prestige in the "colony." Why had they gone to the expense and the
bother of this big establishment, he argued, if they were not to
entertain, and entertain in a large and lavish fashion? This was the
first of a series of dinners he had planned to give. If the invitations
had not been sent long before, Adelle would never have had the party,
for with the strained relations between herself and her husband, social
life was more difficult than ever to her. Adelle was never a brilliant
hostess. She talked little and with effort, and people herded together
in large numbers rendered her quite dumb. This evening she was more
distrait than ever, for her mind clung tenaciously to its one theme as
was the habit of her mind. It would stick to an idea until some solution
presented itself. No mere distraction could shunt it off its course, as
with Archie, who drank and gambled and played polo and shouted and
laughed in order not to think of the many disagreeable things there were
to think about when he allowed himself to lapse into a sober mood.

Even Major Pound, who sat at his hostess's right, noticed after a time
Adelle's preoccupation, although he could be trusted to monologize
egotistically by the half-hour. He had started zestfully on the building
trades in San Francisco. The settlement of the long strike did not seem
to please him any more than it had Tom Clark. He thought that the
"tyranny of labor" was altogether unsupportable, that this country was
fast sinking into the horrors of "socialism," and capital was already
winging its way in fear to other safer refuges. Adelle had heard all
this many times not only from Major Pound and Nelson Carhart, but from
George Pointer and the other men she saw. It was the only kind of
"serious" conversation they ever indulged in. To-night, although she
heard the familiar prophecies of ruin faintly, through the haze of her
own problem, she had a distinct perception of the stupidity of it. What
right had any man to talk in this bitter, doleful tone of his country
and the life of the day? How could any man tell what the times were
going to bring forth? Perhaps her anarchistic cousin--the stone mason
who had considered these matters as he plied his trade under blistering
heat or chilling winds--had arrived at as sane conclusions as this
sleek, well-dressed, well-fed railroad man by her side. She recognized
that life was mostly a bitter fight, and her sympathies were strangely
no