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324 same tone—a tone maintained as artificially as were their looks. They all had the air of existing on stimulants, of one sort or another, and of dreading a single lapse from briskness.

Adela was a woman who suggested forty years by the very elaboration of her youthful get- up; beautifully dressed, wonderfully cared-for, breathing a luxury which could never forget itself for a moment. She was tall and blonde, and her porcelain-blue eyes had a look of knowing the price of everything, and of being quite determined to have the worth of her money. She greeted Teresa without effusion, with a certain frank, amused curiosity; much in the same way she seemed to regard her husband, but without the curiosity.

Ernesto was in his element and happy, discussing the frivolous menu and flirting to right and left; Nina was out of it. Teresa, placed between Crayven and the other man of the party, a bald young man with a drooping blonde moustache and an eye as knowing as Adela's, but more languid, felt a keener liking, a keener sympathy, for Crayven. They two, after all, belonged to the same world—a world which ignored Adela's, as she ignored theirs. She was thoroughly glad to have seen Crayven's wife, to have this additional light on him, and to feel that he had wanted her to have it. The marriage itself was a mystery to her. Adela apparently had the money. Why