. A distinguished guest
of the Colonel's had made an ungrateful criticism of the inner circle,
on parade for his benefit only the week before at Camp Hiawatha, which
was elaborately rebuilt now, and rechristened Camp Everard. He
complained that the Colonel's parties were too successful.

"Too many pretty women," he said, "or they work too hard at it--dress
too well, or talk too well--don't dare to let down. You need more
background, more men like Grant. You need to be bored. You can't have
cream without milk. You can't take the essentials of a society and make
a whole society out of them without adulterating them. It won't last.
That's why Adam and Eve didn't stay in the garden. They couldn't--too
much tension there. They needed casual acquaintances, and you need
background. You can't get on without it."

"We do," said his host.

The distinguished critic was far away from the Colonel's town to-night,
but the Colonel's party was all that he had complained of; the thing he
had felt and tried to account for and explain was here, as it was at all
the Colonel's parties, though a discreet selection of outsiders had been
admitted to-night; the same sense of effort and tension, of working too
hard, of a gayety brilliant but forced--artificial, but justifying the
elaborate processes that created it by its charm, like some rare
hothouse flower.

You saw it in quick glimpses of passing faces thrown into strong relief
by the light of the swinging lanterns, and then dancing out of sight;
you heard it in strained, sweet laughter, and felt it in the beat of the
music, and in the whole picture the party made of itself in the garden,
the restless, changing picture, but this was not all--it was in the air.
You could close your eyes and breathe it and feel it. It was unusually
keen to-night, real, like a thing you could actually touch and see.

You lost the keen sense of it if you looked too closely for signs of it.
If you overheard bits of talk, they were not always clever at all, or
even entirely gay. Worried lines showed under elaborate makeup in the
women's faces, as if Cinderella had put on white gloves to hide smutty
fingers; indeed, though they were trained to forget it and make you
forget it, they were only so many Cinderellas, after all. Seen too
closely, there was a look of strain about some of the men's faces.

There was a reason for this look to-night, besides the set of reasons
which the gentlemen of the Colonel's circl