ong their kind, he doubtless owed it that no other
callers came to disturb the languid afternoon. Seen against her proper
background of things precious but worn, and in the style of a preceding
generation, the girl showed even lovelier than before, with the rich,
perfumed quality of a flower held in a chipped porcelain vase, a flower
moreover secure in its own perfectness, waiting only to be worn,
disdaining alike to offer or resist. Her very quietness--she left him,
in fact, almost wholly to her mother--had the air of condoning his
state, of understanding what he was there for and of finding it somehow
an accentuation of the interest they let him see that he had for them.
He found them, mother and daughter, more alike, in spite of their
natural and evident difference of years, more of a degree than he was
accustomed to find mother and daughters in the few houses where the
business of growing rich had admitted him, as though they had been
carved out of the same material, by the same distinguished artist, at
different times in his career.

It contributed to the effect of his having found, not by accident, but
by seeking, a frame of life kept waiting for him, kept warm and
conscious. Presently Eunice poured tea for them, and the intimacy of her
remembering as she did, how he took it, had its part in the freedom
which he presently found for offering hospitality on his own account,
not at his home, as he explained to them, his sister being away, but say
a dinner at Briar Crest to which they might motor out pleasantly
Saturday afternoon, returning by moonlight. He offered Briar Crest
tentatively on the strength of the Lessings having once given a dinner
there, and was relieved to find that he had made no mistake.

"A great many of your friends go there," Mrs. Goodward allowed; "the Van
Stitarts, Eunice, you remember."

"The Gherberdings are there now, mamma; I'm sure we shall enjoy it."

Having crossed thus at one fortunate stroke the frontiers of social
observance, to which Clarice had but edged her way in the right of being
a Thatcher Inwood, Peter ventured on Friday to suggest by telephone that
since dinner must be late, the ladies should meet him at what he had
taken pains to ascertain was the correct one of huge uptown hotels, for
tea before starting. It was Mrs. Goodward who answered him and she whom
he met in the white, marble tessellated tea-room, explaining that Eunice
had had some shopping to do--they were reall