e from
the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a characteristically
dignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert, she knew, was engaged
to play roulette at the club, and none of her other new men friends was
available for dancing. She hadn't seen anything of Martin for several
days. She could easily oblige Alice under the circumstances.

So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little you
really know about me."

"Thank you," said Alice. "I'll say that I have a headache and that
you're coming home with me. Don't be talked out of it."

A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her shoulder
to Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances. "It doesn't
matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat me
like a sort of moral weathercock. I wonder why?" She gave no more
thought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment had
rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortal
opera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within an
inch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, was
whispering heavy compliments.

Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who had
been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she had
given all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been married a
year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made
up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fed
girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage
she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant
people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and
drakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact the
novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with
flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money
and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human
nature. Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discovered
how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She had
returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war
and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women
whose names, in the public imagination, were associated with decadence
and irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross
work and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who were