always amused her to hear the outsiders discussed by the elect. She learned as she grew up that there were a multiplicity of elects each with its own group of outsiders. She was amused at the queer game played by those “outside” who wanted to “get in.” She had heard the most solemn conversations on the subject. She had never been able to take seriously the enormous importance of the “ins” over the “outs,” because the importance seemed to her to be such a frail bubble, and one so easily pricked. And why did anybody ever want to get “in”? Why not stay “out”? Why not make your own “elect,” if you had to have an “elect”?
She had listened to her mother making out dinner lists. That well-intentioned but sadly unintelligent parent never dreamed that her terrible child was formulating a philosophy about the elect out of so simple a thing as a dinner list. And when Dane Barrington had been crossed off the dinner lists of the country Valerie had wondered if he was foolish enough to think he would lose by it.
And now she felt, without knowing any more of him than the pictures of his beautiful old place by the river and of the tent snuggled in the sand-hills, that this man had learned there were things he could well do without. And it seemed to her that the cleverest thing in the game of life, as in bridge, was to know what you could discard.
She felt now with a lift of her spirits that she would get to know him. The place was too small to keep apart two people who wandered about in the night. She was rather afraid of him mentally. He was brilliant in a profession where she had little more than dreamed her way, and even in their two brief encounters she had felt a cool mental poise balanced against her impetuous dogmatism. She knew she was crude beside him. But she was no depreciator of herself. She had never met a man her personality
