htness from the hovering threat
of the curtain. The quality of the air, the exuberance of the flowers,
the blue intensity of sea and sky, produced the effect of a closing
TABLEAU, when all the lights are turned on at once. This impression was
presently heightened by the way in which a consciously conspicuous group
of people advanced to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the
air of the chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the
final effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance to one
of those "costume-plays" in which the protagonists walk through the
passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood in unrelated
attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about
them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors are named in the
programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly fused the group by
arresting the attention of one of its members.

"Why, Mr. Selden!" Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a gesture
toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added plaintively:
"We're starving to death because we can't decide where to lunch."

Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their difficulty,
Selden learned with amusement that there were several places where one
might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit something by lunching;
so that eating actually became a minor consideration on the very spot
consecrated to its rites.

"Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE--but that looks as if
one hadn't any other reason for being there: the Americans who don't know
any one always rush for the best food. And the Duchess of Beltshire has
taken up Becassin's lately," Mrs. Bry earnestly summed up.

Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher's despair, had not progressed beyond the point
of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not acquire the
air of doing things because she wanted to, and making her choice the
final seal of their fitness.

Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure clothes, met
the dilemma hilariously.

"I guess the Duchess goes where it's cheapest, unless she can get her
meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE she'd turn
up fast enough."

But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. "The Grand Dukes go to that little
place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it's the only restaurant in
Europe wh