to her
communistic, altruistic nature. And Sedyard, having experienced two
inspirations, could think of nothing but combs and candlesticks. So he
threw himself into the current, which swept along Broadway, trusting
that some accident would suggest a suitable offering. Meanwhile, he
revelled in the crowd, good-humored, holiday-making, holly-decked, which
carried him uptown, past Wanamaker's and Grace Church, swirled him
across old "dead man's curve," and down the Fourteenth Street side of
Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here
he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads
of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a
feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of his
kind:

"Buy a hat for your wife. A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by
day. Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it. Becoming to all styles of
feminine beauty. What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine
palate? Three dollars? Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was
twelve. It's a Paris hat, ladies. Your sister, your mother, your maiden
aunt--"

Sedyard hearkened, but absently, to the fellow's words, but his problem
was solved. He would buy Edith something to look pretty in. She was a
pretty girl and in danger of forgetting it. And she had been decent,
John reflected, awfully decent about Mary. He knew that the _entente
cordiale_ which existed between Mary and his mother was largely due to
Edith, and he knew, too, that Edith, an authority on modern-housing and
model-living, surely but silently disapproved of Mary's living alone in
a three-roomed studio and devoting her days to painting, when there was
so much rescue work to be done in the world.

"I get my uplift," Mary would explain when Edith urged these things upon
her, "from the elevator. Living on the eighth floor, dear, I cannot but
help seeing the world from a very different angle."

Yes, John reflected as he chuckled in retrospect over such
conversations, Edith had certainly been awfully decent.

During these meditations several articles of feminine apparel had come
and gone under the hammer. The crowd had decreased somewhat and his
position now commanded a clear view of the auctioneer's platform, and he
realized that the fierce light of the arc lamps beat down upon as
charming a costume as he had seen for many a day. All of corn-flower
blue it was, a chiffon gown, a big chi