awfully bucked to hear there's a good time going after all." He
pleaded drowsily: "Say you'll come though, Robert. You're such a
brick. I'm beastly fond of you, you know."

Robert Stonehouse withdrew his hand sharply from the hot, moist clasp.
(How he had run that night! As though the devil had been after him
instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent
confession.)

"Oh, I'll come," he said.



2

After all, nothing changed very much. Grown-up people masqueraded.
They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still
behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly
wisdom. For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the
old business over again--children whose games he despised and could not
play, despising him.

It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come
into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half
raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and
notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of
almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too
fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted
some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy,
green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.