round
the little card-tables--the well-fed bodies, the well-cared-for skins,
the elaborate toilets, the useless jeweled hands--comfortable, secure,
self-satisfied, idle, always idle, always playing at the imitation
games--like their own pampered children, to be sheltered in the nurseries
of wealth their whole lives through. And not at all in bitterness, but
wholly in sadness, a sense of the injustice, the unfairness of it all--a
sense that had been strong in me in my youth but blunted during the years
of my busy prosperity--returned for a moment. For a moment only; my mind
was soon back to realities--to her and me--to "us." How soon it would never
be "us" again!

"They're mama's friends," Anita was answering. "Oldish and tiresome. When
you leave I shall go straight on up to bed."

"I'd like to--to see your room--where you live," said I, more to myself
than to her.

"I sleep in a bare little box," she replied with a laugh. "It's like a
cell. A friend of ours who has the anti-germ fad insisted on it. But my
sitting-room isn't so bad."

"Langdon has the anti-germ fad," said I. She answered "Yes" after a pause,
and in such a strained voice that I looked at her. A flush was just dying
out of her face. "He was the friend I spoke of," she went on.

"You know him very well?" I asked.

"We've known him--always," said she. "I think he's one of my earliest
recollections. His father's summer place and ours adjoin. And once--I guess
it's the first time I remember seeing him--he was a freshman at Harvard,
and he came along on a horse past the pony cart in which a groom was
driving me. And I--I was very little then--I begged him to take me up, and
he did. I thought he was the greatest, most wonderful man that ever lived."
She laughed queerly. "When I said my prayers, I used to imagine a god that
looked like him to say them to."

I echoed her laugh heartily. The idea of Mowbray Langdon as a god struck me
as peculiarly funny, though natural enough, too.

"Absurd, wasn't it?" said she. But her face was grave, and she let her
cigarette die out.

"I guess you know him better than that now?"

"Yes--better," she answered, slowly and absently. "He's--anything but a
god!"

"And the more fascinating on that account," said I. "I wonder why women
like best the really bad, dangerous sort of man, who hasn't any respect for
them, or for anything."

I said this that she might protest, at least for herself. But her answer
was a vague,