ve you."

"No; I want you to be serious. Because I'm pretty serious. See, I'm not
smiling now; I don't feel like it. Because it is a very, very important
matter, Phil--this thing that has--has--almost happened. . . . It's
about Eileen. . . . And it really has happened."

"What has she done?" he asked curiously.

His sister's eyes were searching his very diligently, as though in quest
of something elusive; and he gazed serenely back, the most unsuspicious
of smiles touching his mouth.

"Phil, dear, a young girl--a very young girl--is a vapid and
uninteresting proposition to a man of thirty-five; isn't she?"

"Rather--in some ways."

"In what way is she not?"

"Well--to me, for example--she is acceptable as children are
acceptable--a blessed, sweet, clean relief from the women of the Fanes'
set, for example?"

"Like Rosamund?"

"Yes. And, Ninette, you and Austin seem to be drifting out of the old
circles--the sort that you and I were accustomed to. You don't mind my
saying it, do you?--but there were so many people in this town who had
something besides millions--amusing, well-bred, jolly people who had no
end of good times, but who didn't gamble and guzzle and stuff themselves
and their friends--who were not eternally hanging around other people's
wives. Where are they, dear?"

"If you are indicting all of my friends, Phil--"

"I don't mean all of your friends--only a small proportion--which,
however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless
bunch--the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the
worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital,
the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, the speed-mad fugitives from the
furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled
animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard--!"

"Philip!"

"Oh, I don't mean that they are any more vicious than the idle and
mentally incompetent in any walk of life. East Side, West Side, Harlem,
Hell's Kitchen, Fifth Avenue, Avenue A, and Abingdon Square--the
denizens are only locally different, not specifically--the species
remains unchanged. But everywhere, in every quarter and class and set
and circle there is always the depraved; and the logical links that
connect them are unbroken from Fifth Avenue to Chinatown, from the
half-crazed extravagances of the Orchils' Louis XIV ball to a New Year's
reception at the Haymarket where Troy Lil's diamonds outshine