or himself, with profuse
apologies for drinking alone; apologies which she hardly seemed to
notice.

"Deuced bad form of Wally, I must say," the gilded youth resumed, trying
to make capital for himself, "to leave you in the lurch, this way!"

Silence from Catherine. The would-be interloper, feeling that he was on
the wrong track, took counsel with himself and remained for a moment
immersed in what he imagined to be thought. At last, however, with an
oblique glance at his indifferent companion, he remarked.

"Devilish hard time women have in this world, you know! Don't you
sometimes wish you were a man?"

Her answer flashed back like a rapier:

"No! Do you wish _you_ were?"

Stunned by this "facer," Reginald Van Slyke gasped and stared. That he,
a scion of the Philadelphia Van Slykes, in his own right worth two
hundred million dollars--dollars ground out of the Kensington
carpet-mill slaves by his grandfather--should be thus flouted and put
upon by the daughter of Flint, that parvenu, absolutely floored him. For
a moment he sat there speechless, unable even to reach for his drink;
but presently some coherence returned. He was about to utter what he
conceived to be a strong rejoinder, when the girl suddenly standing up,
turned her back upon him and ignored him as completely as she might have
ignored any of the menials of the club.

His irritated glance followed hers. There, far down the drive, just
rounding the long turn by the artificial lake, a big blue motor car was
speeding up the grade at a good clip. Van Slyke recognized it, and swore
below his breath.

"Wally, at last, damn him!" he muttered. "Just when I was beginning to
make headway with Kate!"

Vexed beyond endurance, he drummed on the cloth with angry fingers; but
Catherine was oblivious. Unmindful of the merry-makers at the other
tables, the girl waved her handkerchief at the swiftly-approaching
motor. Waldron, from the back seat, raised an answering hand--though
without enthusiasm. Above all things he hated demonstration, and the
girl's frank manner, free, unconventional and not yet broken to the
harness of Mrs. Grundy, never failed to irritate him.

"Very incorrect for people in our set," he often thought. "But for the
present I can do nothing. Once she is my wife, ah, then I shall find
means to curb her. For the present, however, I must let her have her
head."

Such was now his frame of mind as the long car slid under the
porte-cochere and ca