rld he is fussing with before
sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay.
There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with
some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual
words with Elinor before dinner--a real talk with Ted in one of the
intermissions of the dance--a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two
from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one
of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his
mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his
years in such a solid and satisfactory way--perhaps the queer gods
that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward
practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough
applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious
merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be
alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that
people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for
Oliver Crowe.

So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though
outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the
dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet
had organized--he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with
superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and
everyone went up to dress for dinner.

XXIX

Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street--she heads letters
from it playfully "The Hen Coop" for there is almost always some member
of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters
is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of
New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls
east for visits and clothes--Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished
manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the
supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little
apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded
and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear
little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English
plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books--a
countable number of them--and on top of it the genuine signed photograph
of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she alway