d
utterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments of
Cannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate house, a
faithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the Avenue
Wagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.

They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over twenty,
the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room hung with
French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged gilt chairs and
tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing, with all the gravity
and imitative genius of little girls in a nursery, at being grown up.

While the servants moved discreetly about, Joan kept up a rattle of
impersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and Gargantuan
furniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-century voice,
throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed belief in her divine
right to queen it, and saying things that made Alice chuckle about the
d'Oylys--that apparently ill-matched pair. She drank a glass of
champagne with the air of a connoisseur and finally, having displayed
an excellent appetite, mounted a cigarette into a long thin
mother-of-pearl holder, lighted it and sank with a sigh into the room's
one comfortable chair.

"Gilbert gave me a cigarette holder like that," said Alice.

"Yes? I think this comes from him," said Joan. "A thoughtful person!"

That Joan was not quite sure from whom she received it annoyed Alice
far more than if she had boasted of it as one of Gilbert's numerous
gifts. She needed no screwing up now to say what she had rather timidly
brought this cool young slip of a thing there to discuss.

"Will you tell me about yourself and Gilbert?" she asked quietly. There
was no need for Joan to act complete composure. She felt it. "What is
there to tell, my dear?"

"I hope there isn't anything--I mean anything that matters. But perhaps
you don't know that people have begun to talk about you, and I think
you owe it to me to be perfectly frank."

Even then it didn't occur to Joan that there was anything serious in
the business. "I'll be as frank as the front page of The Times--'All
the news that's fit to print,'" she said. "What do you want to know?"

Alice proved her courage. She drew up a chair, bent forward and came
straight to the point. "Be honest with me, Joan, even if you have to
hurt me. Gilbert is very handsome, and women throw themselves at him. I
did, I suppose; but h