e late
and as usual Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those
already collected with the nervous kindliness of an absent-minded
menagerie-trainer who is trying to make a happy family out of a wombat,
a porcupine, and two small Scotch terriers because they are all very
nice and he likes them all and he can't quite remember at the moment
just where he got hold of any of them. This evening he has been making
an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the youngest Harvard playwright
to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite, impeccably correct from
his club tie to the small gold animal on his watch-chain, is almost
coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San Francisco cartoonist
to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to New York that no
matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds himself buried
under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse or Foyot's
has the best _hors-d'oeuvres_ in Paris.

The conflict is taking place across Johnny's knees, both of which are
being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like
a sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he
is quite content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the
country, who, if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward
French and a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty
failings of prominent debutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall,
the youngest star of the Provincetown Players out of a prickly silence,
employed in supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated
Harlequins by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future
of Eugene O'Neill.

Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience
overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can
be both human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties
instead of Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny
Chipman. Johnny rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied
the very two worms he was keeping room for to top off breakfast. "Well"
he says to the world at large. "They're only fifteen minutes late apiece
this time."

He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either
side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already
gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.

Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping,
dresse