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 in which he had first seen her, Olga seemed as much at home as Mme. Casimir among her gold-legged chairs. Touching a match to the samovar and ranging the cups, Olga, like Mme. Casimir, was presiding over the table of a man whose creations were strange and even hostile to her; but unlike Mme. Casimir, and markedly so, Olga conveyed the impression of having flitted into this room by chance. Though there were little signs of her residence about the salon, though she fitted beautifully enough into these buff and lavender and gray surroundings, though the rich corduroy sheen of her hair threw back familiar gleams to the mirror in which Mamie was trying to make herself look as little as possible like a woman from Idaho, it would not have seemed strange if Olga had, at an appropriate moment, got up, put on her béret, kissed Oscar nonchalantly on the nose, said to him, in the slang of the streets, "Adieu, je t'ai vu!" and frisked off—where? Oh, to the fancy dress ball that Life, to any sister of Léon Vaudreuil, must, when all was said and done, consist of.

"Thé? Ou bien autre chose!" she was asking him, with a cup held tentatively under the spiggot.

"Autre chose," he laughed.

She peered down to the lower shelf of the table, taking stock of the bottles. "There's cognac and Swedish punch and grand marnier and—"

"Let it be cognac, with a dash of curaçao," Grover decided.