---"

"Jim, please be careful. She is taken seriously----"

"Taken seriously ill? There, dear, I won't guy your guests. What an
absolutely deathly face she has!"

"She is considered beautiful."

"She has the profile of an Egyptian. She's as dead-white as an
Egyptian leper----"

"Hush!"

"Hush it is, sweetness! Who's the good-looking chap over by Ilse?"

"Stanley Wardner."

"And his star trick?"

"He's a secessionist sculptor."

"What's that?"

"He is one of the ultra-modern men who has seceded from the Society
of American Sculptors to form, with a few others, a new group."

"Is he any good?"

"Well, Jim, I don't know," she said candidly. "I don't think I am
quite in sympathy with his work."

"What sort is it?"

"If I understand him, he is what is termed, I believe, a concentrationist.
For instance, in a nude figure which he is exhibiting in his studio, it's
all a rough block of marble except, in the middle of the upper part,
there is a nose."

"A nose!"

"Really, it is beautifully sculptured," insisted Palla.

"But--good heavens!--isn't there any other anatomical feature to that
block of marble?"

"I explained that he is a concentrationist. His school believes in
concentrating on a single feature only, and in rendering that feature
as minutely and perfectly as possible."

Jim said: "He looks as sane as a broker, too. You never can tell, can
you, sweetness?"

He glanced at several other people whose features were not familiar,
but Palla's explanations of her friends had slightly discouraged him
and he made no further inquiries.

Vanya Tchernov was there, dreamy and sweet-mannered; Estridge sat by
Ilse, looking a trifle careworn, as though hospital work were taking
it out of him. Marya Lanois was there, too, with her slightly slanting
green eyes and her tiger-red hair--attracting from him a curious sort
of stealthy admiration, inexplicable to him because he knew he was so
entirely in love with Palla.

A woman of forty sat on his right--he promptly forgot her name each
time he heard it--who ate fastidiously and chose birth-control as the
subject for conversation. And he dodged it in vain, for her
conversation had become a monologue, and he sat fiddling with his
food, very red, while the silky voice, so agreeable in pitch and
intonation, slid smoothly on.

Afterward Palla explained that she was a celebrated sociologist, but
Jim remained shy of her.

Other people came in after dinner. Van