and a great part of the room were engaged in
watching Roger Barnes and Miss Maddison walking together through a space
which seemed to have been cleared on purpose for them, but was really
the result of a move towards the supper-room.

"Was there ever such a pair?" said an enthusiastic voice behind the
General. "Athene and Apollo take the floor!" A gray-haired journalist
with a small, bewrinkled face, buried in whiskers, and beard, laid a
hand on the General's arm as he spoke.

The General smiled vaguely. "Do you know Mrs. and Miss Maddison?"

"Rather!" said the little man. "Miss Elsie's a wonder! As pretty and
soft as they make them, and a Greek scholar besides--took all sorts of
honours at Radcliffe last year. I've known her from her cradle."

"What a number of your girls go to college!" said the General, but
ungraciously, in the tones of one who no sooner saw an American custom
emerging than his instinct was to hit it.

"Yes; it's a feature of our modern life--the life of our women. But not
the most significant one, by a long way."

The General could not help a look of inquiry.

The journalist's face changed from gay to grave. "The most significant
thing in American life just now----"

"I know!" interrupted the General. "Your divorce laws!"

The journalist shook his head. "It goes deeper than that. What we're
looking on at is a complete transformation of the idea of marriage----"

A movement in the crowd bore the speaker away. The General was left
watching the beautiful pair in the distance. They were apparently quite
unconscious that they roused any special attention. Laughing and
chatting like two children, they passed into the supper-room and
disappeared.

Ten minutes later, in the supper-room, Barnes deserted the two ladies
with whom he had entered, and went in pursuit of a girl in white, whose
necklace of star sapphires, set in a Spanish setting of the seventeenth
century, had at once caught the eye of the judicious. Roger, however,
knew nothing of jewels, and was only conscious as he approached Miss
Floyd, first of the mingling in his own mind of something like
embarrassment with something like defiance, and then, of the glitter in
the girl's dark eyes.

"I hope you had an interesting debate," he said. "Mrs. Phillips tells me
you went to the Senate."

Daphne looked him up and down. "Did I?" she said slowly. "I've
forgotten. Will you move, please? There's someone bringing me an ice."
And turning