promise.

"How do you do?" repeated Peter politely.

"I'm o'right."

"Can I offer you a drink?"

Private Rose looked at him searchingly, suspecting possible sarcasm.

"O'right," he said finally.

Peter indicated a chair.

"Sit down."

"I got a friend," said Rose, "I got a friend in there." He pointed to
the green door.

"By all means let's have him in."

Peter crossed over, opened the door and welcomed in Private Key, very
suspicious and uncertain and guilty. Chairs were found and the three
took their seats around the punch bowl. Peter gave them each a
highball and offered them a cigarette from his case. They accepted
both with some diffidence.

"Now," continued Peter easily, "may I ask why you gentlemen prefer to
lounge away your leisure hours in a room which is chiefly furnished,
as far as I can see, with scrubbing brushes. And when the human race
has progressed to the stage where seventeen thousand chairs are
manufactured on every day except Sunday--" he paused. Rose and Key
regarded him vacantly. "Will you tell me," went on Peter, "why you
choose to rest yourselves on articles, intended for the transportation
of water from one place to another?"

At this point Rose contributed a grunt to the conversation.

"And lastly," finished Peter, "will you tell me why, when you are in a
building beautifully hung with enormous candelabra, you prefer to
spend these evening hours under one anemic electric light?"

Rose looked at Key; Key looked at Rose. They laughed; they laughed
uproariously; they found it was impossible to look at each other
without laughing. But they were not laughing with this man--they were
laughing at him. To them a man who talked after this fashion was
either raving drunk or raving crazy.

"You are Yale men, I presume," said Peter, finishing his highball and
preparing another.

They laughed again.

"Na-ah."

"So? I thought perhaps you might be members of that lowly section of
the university known as the Sheffield Scientific School."

"Na-ah."

"Hm. Well, that's too bad. No doubt you are Harvard men, anxious to
preserve your incognito in this--this paradise of violet blue, as the
newspapers say."

"Na-ah," said Key scornfully, "we was just waitin' for somebody."

"Ah," exclaimed Peter, rising and filling their glasses, "very
interestin'. Had a date with a scrublady, eh?"

They both denied this indignantly.

"It's all right," Peter reassured them, "don't apologize. A
scrubl