t Mary Byrd is, but, in her quiet way,
she is very handsome."

"No, she isn't the beauty that Mary Byrd is," conceded Stephen, so
pleasantly that she realized he was repeating parrot-like the phrase she
had uttered. His thoughts were somewhere else, she observed bitterly; it
was perfectly evident that he was not paying the slightest attention to
anything that she said.

"You must use your father's car," she remarked, as amiably as before.
"It is better to have a chauffeur, and Mary Byrd is going with Willy
Tarleton."

"And the other girls?" he asked, for her words appeared at last to have
penetrated the haze that enveloped his mind.

"Harriet is spending the night with Lily Whittle, and she will go from
there. Of course Victoria has given up dancing since she came home from
France, and poor Janet stopped going to parties the year she came out."

This pitiless maternal classification of Janet aroused his amusement.
"Well, I'd be glad to take Janet anywhere, even if her nose is a little
longer than Mary Byrd's," he retorted. "She's the jolliest of the lot,
and she seems to me very well contented as she is."

"Oh, she is," assented his mother eagerly. "I always tell her that her
disposition is worth a fortune; and she has a very good figure too. But,
of course, a pretty face is the most important thing before marriage and
the least important thing afterward," she added shrewdly, as she left
him at his door.

In a dream he dressed himself and went down to the dining-room; in a
dream he sat through the slow ceremonious supper; in a dream he got into
his father's car; and in a dream he stopped for Margaret and drove on
again with her fragrant presence beside him. When he entered the
glaring, profusely decorated house of the Harrisons, he felt that he was
still only half awake to the actuality.

The May night was as warm as summer, and swinging garlands of ferns and
peonies concealed electric fans which were suspended from the ceiling.
In the midst of the strong wind of the whirring fans, the dancers in the
two long drawing-rooms appeared to be blown violently in circles and
eddies, like coloured leaves in a high wind. For a few minutes after
Stephen had entered, the rooms seemed to him merely a brilliant haze,
where the revolving figures appeared and vanished like the colours of a
kaleidoscope. Near the door he became aware of the resplendent form of
his hostess, stationed appropriately against a background of peonie