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 surprised him on that evening, when he was engaged in an affair which had nothing to do with the Ketlar case and which should not have suggested the Royle girl.

Calvin, in fact, was a guest at a dinner-dance at a fashionable little bandbox of a dance-club patronized by families described in the newspapers as most "exclusive."

Of course nobody in Chicago who knew Calvin Clarke excluded him. Every hostess who was acquainted with him was careful to send him a card when she was to entertain, and usually the hostesses telephoned him, also, urging him to come. Being a young man from Harvard, a bachelor and of a family two hundred and fifty years in America, naturally he was sought after in a city where a lineage is ancient if it can be traced back to "the fire" of 1871 and where a family which antedates the World's Fair, held in 1893, is deemed old and established.

Calvin declined most of his invitations and thereby became more ardently sought, especially by people who understood him so slightly that they felt he snubbed them. Calvin consciously snubbed no one; he merely followed a consistent rule which forbade him to attend entertainments that demanded late hours of him on weekdays.

He knew several of those who inhabited the pretentious mansions and apartments of the Lake Shore Drive and the adjoining streets known as "the gold coast." Since most of the men had gone east to college, Calvin shared with them many associations, but he felt little in common with them beyond college experiences.

They had much more money than the nomads inhabiting the brick-and-mortar encampments of the flat-buildings further north along the shore and they thought of themselves as a much more stable people. But few indeed had dwelt in the same house for as much as thirty years and most of them had abandoned, well within