me had come
into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half
raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and
notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of
almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too
fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted
some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy,
green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.

Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had
prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and
master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and
aimless pleasure. He knew how to deal with men and women whose
sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but
these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings,
almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed
his very own), threw him from his security. They made him
self-conscious and self-distrustful. They might be ten times more
worthless than he believed them to be, and he might be ten times a
bigger man than the Robert Stonehouse who had made such a good thing of
his life. They had still the power to put him in the wrong and to make
him an oaf and an outsider. And they knew it. He felt their glances
slide over him furtively and a little mockingly. Yet outwardly he
conformed to them. He wore his clothes well enough, and his
self-control covered over his real distress with a rather repellent
arrogance. He was even handsome, as a plain man can become handsome
whose mind has dominated from the start over a fine body. And with
this air of power went his flagrant youthfulness.

But the girl standing next him dropped him a flippant question with
veiled irony and dislike in her stupid eyes, and turned away from him
before he answered. She was a vulgar, garish little creature, and he
could afford to smile satirically (and perhaps too consciously) at the
powdered shoulder which she jerked up at him. And yet he was deeply,
miserably shamed.

It was like a play in which he was the only one who did not know his
part. Even Cosgrave played up--a little too triumphantly, showing
off--as a tried man-of-the-world. And at her given moment the star
performer made a dramatic entry into the midst of them, a cloak of pale
blue brocade thrown over her scanty dress and her plumes still toss