ome each
sally, _mot_, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply
costs you a bay leaf. Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her
nostrils to her mouth. To hold her own not a chance must be missed.
A sentence addressed to her must be as a piccolo, each word of it
a stop, which she must be prepared to seize upon and play. And she
must always be quicker than a Micmac Indian to paddle the light
canoe of conversation away from the rocks in the rapids that flow
from the Pierian spring. For, plodding reader, the handwriting on
the wall in the banquet hall of Bohemia is "_Laisser faire_." The
gray ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is that
of slain old King Convention. Freedom is the tyrant that holds them
in slavery.

As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather
than for the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to
business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her
glass of wine.

"Now while you are fed and in good humor," she said, "I want to
make a suggestion to you about a new cover."

"A good idea," said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his
napkin. "I'll speak to the waiter about it."

Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate
Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room
with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous,
worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from
the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the
dumb-waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion.
Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. Mrs. Pothunter told
the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss Adrian
hummed what is still called a _chanson_ in the cafes of Bridgeport.
Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor's
smile, which meant: "Great! but you'll have to send them in through
the regular channels. If I were the chief now--but you know how it
is."

And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that
the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so
out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with
gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed
by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.

Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of
the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small
hand-bag, 'phoned for