e heavy-chested youth was blushing and evidently glad to
have passed through the ordeal. Women, I think, average greater courage
than men. In the interval before the next number we sought our places
and I had but slipped my hat in the grooves beneath my seat when my
nearest neighbor, a very charming young person, addressed me at once,
and I recognized in her the little lady who had called me an old fogy at
the Van Rossums.

"Why, how do you do, Mr. Lambley," she said, and turned to a short and
wide-shouldered youth who appeared to have taken the place of the
six-footer. "Freddy dear, I want to introduce Professor Lambley, who has
written a great essay on Dionysius the Areopagite."

The young man pushed an able hand towards me and grasped mine.

"How jolly!" he exclaimed. "Something to do with aviation, isn't it?
I'm expecting to take it up soon."

"How silly you are, Freddy," the young woman reproved him, "it's an
awfully scientific thing."

"Oh! Well, then, that lets me out," acknowledged Freddy,
conscientiously, "but I think a lot of the fellows who work out those
affairs. Knew a chap who was drowned at Montauk last summer, who was
keen on bees and bugs. Queer Johnnie!"

Our scientific and literary symposium ceased abruptly. The accompanist
came in and sat at the piano, being immediately followed by a young lady
I remembered seeing in Richetti's rooms. My little neighbor applauded,
frantically, as did most of the audience.

"Her father's worth two millions," she informed me, "and she thinks her
voice is the biggest ever. Her hair doesn't naturally wave that way and
she's got too much rouge on. Richetti didn't want her to go on yet, but
she made her father insist."

My own knowledge of the divine art of singing, as I have confessed a
thousand times, amounts to little or nothing, but I found something
pleasurable in listening to the plutocratic contralto. She was by no
means embarrassed and began the "Angelic Voice" from _Gioconda_ in a
most business-like fashion, finishing amid a salvo of applause.

"There! I've gone and split my glove," said the young lady beside me,
"but I just had to do it. I'm going to their house-party next week and
the place is perfectly gorgeous."

Next, as an encore, came "He shall feed His flocks" from the _Messiah_,
which received similar encomiums and the singer retired, smothered in
flowers and followed by uproarious approval.

"Funny she should have selected that," came the vo