for somebody quite outside either of your worlds."

Sally raised her brows in saucy imitation of Mrs. Lloyd Avalons's pet
expression. Then she pushed Beatrix's words aside with daintily
outstretched fingers.

"Can't you?" she said coolly, as she ended her little pantomime. "Well,
I can. To adopt Bobby's choice illustration, it would be like mixing
potato and frappe. The potato would melt the frappe, and then the frappe
would--well, would render the potato unpalatable. In other words, if we
work together, I shall pulverize Mrs. Lloyd Avalons, and then the dust
of her individuality will get in among my nerves and clog them."

"If you can't be consistent, Miss Van Osdel, please do try to be
concrete," Thayer urged. "I confess that I find it a little difficult to
follow you."

"Not at all," Bobby interposed. "She isn't going anywhere. Sally's
mental processes always remind me of the way we used to play cars in a
row of easy chairs. We were extremely energetic, and we pretended that
we were going somewhere; but in reality we didn't budge an inch. Sally,
what is the reason you don't like Mrs. Lloyd Avalons?"

"Because she is utterly preposterous," Sally replied concisely.

"And yet, she is bound to arrive, some day," Lorimer said thoughtfully.

"Then I hope it may not be until after I have left," Sally retorted. "I
don't care to have her making connections with me."

"Sally, you are uncharitable," Beatrix said rebukingly; but Bobby
interrupted,--

"That's more than you can say of Mrs. Lloyd Avalons. She is on half the
charity committees in town."

"How did she get there?" Thayer asked, with unfeigned curiosity.

"By toiling upward, day and night. That's where she scores ahead of the
great men. According to the poet, they only belonged to the night
shift. Mrs. Lloyd Avalons sleeps with the Blue Book under her pillow and
dreams social combinations."

"She probably has a chess board always at her elbow," Sally suggested.
"I can fancy the game, the white queen and her pawn against the whole
black force, each man neatly tagged with his name and social status."

"She is marching straight into the king-row, though," Bobby added.

Beatrix called them to order.

"Does it strike you that this is perilously near to being gossip?" she
inquired.

But Sally had the last word.

"It's not gossip to talk over the possibilities of the lower classes,"
she remarked imperturbably. "It is social science."

Lorimer went back t