e anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to
learn that they could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would
contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing
of comfort to one's children rendered impossible, the establishment
of one's destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would
there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted "universal happiness."
It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the
next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.

He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from these
nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve
in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work
out their hearts' desires, with the upper class destroyed and the even
more hateful middle class at their mercy.

It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel,
and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous
sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many
men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every
privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might
ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but
little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed
the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city
shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men
who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did
not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not
create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all
for their voyage.

A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry,
was beyond Davidge's imagining. He comforted himself with the thought
that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor
problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools
they worked with most.

The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head
of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.

CHAPTER III

Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected
the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set
steps.

Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much
of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan
and could "shake a sugar-heel" with a pr