he felt just a little bit like a
fairy godmother in having surrounded Joan with so many of the smartest
members of the younger set barely three weeks after her astonishing
arrival in a city in which she had only one friend.

Alice didn't blind herself to the fact that in order to gamble, most of
the girls in the room would go, without the smallest discrimination, to
anybody's house; but there were others,--notably Mrs. Alan Hosack, Mrs.
Cooper Jekyll and Enid Ouchterlony,--whose pride it was to draw a hard,
relentless line between themselves and every one, however wealthy, who
did not belong to families of the same, or almost the same,
unquestionable standing as their own. Their presence in the little
house in East Sixty-seventh Street gave it, they were well aware, a
most enviable cachet and placed Joan safely within the inner circle of
New York society--the democratic royal inclosure. It was something to
have achieved so soon--little as Joan appeared, in her astonishing
coolness, to appreciate it. The Ludlows, as Joan had told Alice with
one of her frequent laughs, might have come over in the only staterooms
on the ship which towed the heavily laden Mayflower, but that didn't
alter the fact that the Hosacks, the Jekylls and the Ouchterlonys were
the three most consistently exclusive and difficult families in the
country, to know whom all social climbers would joyously mortgage their
chances of eternity. Alice placed a feather in her cap accordingly.

Joan's table was the first to break up. She was a loser to the tune of
seventy dollars, and while she wrote her check to Marie Littlejohn, a
tiny blond exotic not much older than herself,--who laid down the law
with the ripe authority of a Cabinet Minister and kept to a daily
time-table with the unalterable effrontery of a fashionable
doctor,--talked over her shoulder to Christine Hurley.

"Alice tells me that your brother has gone to France with the Canadian
Flying Corps. Aren't you proud of him?"

"I suppose so, but it isn't our war, and they're awfully annoyed about
it at Piping Rock. He was the crack man of the polo team, you know. I
don't see that there was any need of his butting into this European
fracas."

"I quite agree with you," said Miss Littlejohn, with her eyes on the
clock. "I broke my engagement to Metcalfe Hussey because he insisted on
going over to join the English regiment his grandfather used to belong
to. I've no patience with sentimentality." Sh