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Rh of the stale old order. It was so easy now to set a party going, to make all her guests enjoy themselves; a little leaning on the table with her elbows, a little shouted talk to right and left, with a cheap epigram or two thrown in, did all that. She—and her reputation for saying brilliant things was not entirely undeserved—had now only to say that Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony was a deplorable performance to find someone else who would back up this or any other preposterous criticism; she had only to say that Sargent painted hands more wonderfully than hands were ever painted yet to make a focus of eager talk, in which Edgar joined from the other end of the table. She herself had just been painted by that artist, and she had before now likened the presentment of her hands to bunches of bananas. But it answered just as well to say that his chirography was inimitable. Edgar liked critical conversation and discussion, and she wanted to please him in little things, and in particular she wanted him to be content, at ease. But what she said signified nothing. Nothing signified except that young merry face of the man who sat two or three places away. He, too, was doing the right thing—talking eagerly, nonsensically. Occasionally she caught a sentence of his, he occasionally caught one of hers, and each listened only to the other.

"Hands—yes, hands," she was saying; "and people say 'Only hands.' Why, hands are the first things one judges by in one's estimate of a person. Eyes, mouth, face are really much less characteristic."

At the same moment Charlie finished some ridiculous remarks.

"So if you don't draw the line somewhere, where are you to draw the line?" he asked dramatically.

Then their eyes met, and for one second each was conscious of nothing except the other. Everything else reeled into nothingness; only one thing was real. She had seen nothing of him all day, had but interchanged one word with him at breakfast. She leaned forward.

"Charlie, you deserter," she said, "I haven't set eyes on you. But you appear content with life, so I suppose you won at golf. That makes a man more fatuously cheerful than anything else."

"Cheerful I am," he said; "fatuous I object to. Anybody would. Am I fatuous?" he asked Mouse.

Edgar looked about him with an air of pleased proprietorship. His guests, the conversation, the general air of the evening, were all very much to his taste. And it seemed to him that there