opinion of the Albert Hall concerts. When he discovered
Elfrida to be an American, and therefore not specially
susceptible to praise of English classical interpretations,
he allowed himself to become critical, and their talk
increased in liveliness and amiability.

Mrs. Morrow listened with an appreciative air for a few
minutes, playing with her fan; then she turned to Mr.
Ticke.

"Golightly," she said acidly, "I am dying of thirst You
shall take me to the refreshment table."

So the star of the evening was abandoned to Elfrida, and
finding in her a refuge from the dreadful English tongue,
he clung to her. She was so occupied with him in this
character that almost all the other distinguished people
who attended the _soiree_ of the Arcadia Club escaped
her. Golightly asked her reproachfully afterward how he
could possibly have pointed them out to her, absorbed as
she was--and some of them would have been so pleased to
be introduced to her! She met a few notwithstanding;
they were chiefly rather elderly unmarried ladies, who
immediately mentioned to her the paper they were connected
with, and one or two of them, learning that she was a
newcomer, kindly gave her their cards, and asked her to
come and see them any second Tuesday. They had indefinite
and primitive ideas of doing their hair, and they were
certainly _mal tournee_; but Elfrida saw that she made
an impression on them--that they would remember her and
talk of her; and seeing that, other things became less
noteworthy. She felt that these ladies were more or less
emancipated, on easy terms with the facts of life, free
from the prejudices that tied the souls of people she
saw shopping at the Stores, for instance. That, and a
familiarity with the exigencies of copy at short notice,
was discernible in the way they talked and looked about
them, and the readiness with which they produced a pencil
to write the second Tuesday on their cards. Almost every
lady suggested that she might have decorated the staff
of her journal an appreciable number of years, if that
supposition had not been forbidden by the fact that the
feminine element in journalism is of comparatively recent
introduction. Elfrida wondered what they occupied themselves
with before. It did not detract from her sense of the
success of the evening--Golightly Ticke went about telling
everybody that she was the new American writer on the
_Age_--to feel herself altogether the youngest person
present,