st. "God! I wish we were there now. When I'm not writing----!
How many men have you got in love with you already? But no. I don't
care. When I'm here--_like this, Mary, like this_--I don't care a hang
if I never write another line."

XXXVII

During the following week she gave a dinner and insisted upon his
attendance. She had given others to that increasing throng that had
been young with her in the eighties and to others who had stormed and
conquered that once impregnable citadel, but, she informed him, it was
now time to entertain some of the younger women, and he must help her.

He consented readily enough, for he was curious to see her surrounded
by a generation into which she had coolly stepped with no disadvantage
to herself and, from all he heard, considerable to them. He knew that
not only Vane but other men in their late twenties and early thirties
were paying her devoted attentions. Dinwiddie, who met him in the Park
one day and dined with him in the Casino, had spoken with modified
enthusiasm of these conquests, but added that it was yet to be
demonstrated whether the young men were egged by novelty or genuine
coveting. When he hinted that she may have appealed to that secret
lust for the macabre that exists somewhere in all men, Clavering had
scowled at him so ferociously that he had plunged into rhapsody and
bewailed his own lost youth.

And then he had endeavored to sound the young man in whom he was most
interested, but of whose present relations with Mary Zattiany he had no
inkling; he had not seen them together nor heard any fresh gossip since
her second debut. But he was told to shut up and talk about the
weather.

Clavering, who knew that he would not have a moment alone with her,
went to the dinner in much the same mood as he went to a first-night at
which he was reasonably sure of entertainment. It certainly would be
good comedy to the detached observer, and this he was quite capable of
being with nothing better in prospect. Nevertheless, he was utterly
unprepared for the presence of Anne Goodrich and Marian Lawrence, for
he understood that the dinner was given to the more important of the
young married women. But they were the first persons he saw when he
entered the drawing-room. They were standing together--shoulder to
shoulder, he reflected cynically--and he knew that they privately
detested each other, and not on his account only.

How like Mary Zattiany, with her