alazzo Santonini,
on that marvelous old service that Pietro polished but three times a
year, with every morsel of refreshment arranged and calculated
beforehand.

What miracles of economy would be performed in that stone-flagged
kitchen, many of them by Mamma's own hands! Suddenly Maria Angelina
found a moment to wonder afresh at that mother . . . and with a new
vision. . . . For Mamma had come from this profusion.

"They have a regular place at Newport." Ruth was concluding some unheard
speech behind her. "But they like this better. . . . This is the life,"
and with a just faintly discernible note of proprietorship in her air
she was off down the stairs.

"Didn't they find Newport rather chilly?" murmured the girl to whom she
had been talking. "Wasn't Mrs. M. a Smith or a Brown-Jones or
something----?"

"It was something in butterine," said another guest negligently and
swore, softly and intensely, at a shoulder strap. "Oh, _damn_ the
thing! . . . Well--flop if you want to. I've got nothing to hide."

"You know why girls hide their ears, don't you?" said the other voice,
and the second girl flung wearily back, "Oh, so they can have something
to show their husbands--I heard that in my cradle!"

"It _is_ rather old," its sponsor acknowledged wittily, and the pair
went clattering on.

Had America, Maria Angelina wondered, been like this in her mother's
youth? Was it from such speeches that her mother had turned, in
helplessness or distaste, to the delicate implications, the finished
innuendo of the Italian world?

Or had times changed? Were these girls truly different from their
mothers? Was it a new society?

That was it, she concluded, and she, in her old-world seclusion, was of
another era from these assured ones. . . . Again, for a moment the doubt
of her capacity to cope with these times assailed her, but only for a
moment, for next instant she caught Johnny Byrd's upturned glance from
the floor below and in its flash of admiration, as unstinted as a sun
bath, her confidence drew reanimation.

Later, she found that same warmth in other men's eyes and in the
eagerness with which they kept cutting in.

That cutting in, itself, was strange to her. It filled her with a
terrifying perspective of what would happen if she were _not_ cut in
upon--if she were left to gyrate endlessly in the arms of some luckless
one, eternally stuck. . . .

At home, at a ball, she knew that there were fixed dances, and program