, as the little feet tripped daintily
from puddle to puddle, or splashed her white skirts with great mud
blotches, while the owner folded them about her and pattered rapidly on
her heels, foolishly fancying the more speed the less mud. An occasional
witticism from Rennsler's lips would heighten the grotesqueness of a
luckless passer's struggles. The other two would laugh and Howard-Jones
would add some strained gibe, with the flat effect that forced wit
always has. Perhaps half an hour was thus passed, when Howard-Jones
spied a woman leaving a house in a side street. A carriage was waiting
at the curb, and a footman was vainly endeavoring to protect her
feathers from the rain; but forgetting the servant and his umbrella, she
gathered her skirts up frantically and rushed from the bottom step to
the carriage door, which, of course being closed, left her no
alternative but to stand patiently in the drenching rain until the
marked precision of the footman's steps brought relief and the umbrella.

"Look at that action!" shouted Howard-Jones. "Great for park work but
too high for the open. Easy, my beauty, or you will come a cropper at
the curb. By Jove, fellows, it is Mrs. Harry Osgood."

"So it is," replied Waterman. "I wonder what she is mousing about that
street after? She must be searching for her Duncan. Dear girl, how
pathetically lonesome she looked at Sherry's last night when Grahame
left her to dance with Mrs. Rossy Platt."

This remark was hailed by Howard-Jones with the world-wise chuckle with
which a man of narrow sympathy and ill-spent life invariably receives a
pointed insinuation against a woman's character. Broad sentiments and
heroic impulses are seldom nursed in clubs, and Howard-Jones had learned
his ethics within the limits of the world in which he moved.

"If I were Osgood, I would go gunning for Grahame," he retorted. "A
rounder like Duncan never hovers about a bird so long for nothing."

"He had far better give up dogs and horses and bestow a little attention
on his wife," Rennsler Van Vort replied. He had the persuasive sympathy,
possessed by few men, which told him that a woman's heart, though easily
won by flattery may be as easily lost by neglect. The lack of fortune
had brought him into contact with the petty meanness of life and if he
had made friends whose hospitality helped out his meagre purse, he knew
that without his postprandial accomplishments and unquestioned ancestry
few boards would