a few minutes, drive his sister and two of their friends to a young people's party in Scarborough. After I had asked him a few banal questions about his school, a topic which did not appear greatly to "intrigue" him, he edged into the adjoining room and diddled with the piano till his sister Dorothy skipped in, looking like an adolescent Bacchante,—she is a little over seventeen,—and they disappeared together.
Cornelia in the meantime had also explained that Oliver Senior was in the library with Vernon Willys. "I don't like him much," she added, "in fact, I think him rather horrid. He is very happy to-night over his separation from his wife. He could hardly wait to get inside the door to tell us about it. But I believe you have discovered something precious in his books, and Oliver seems infatuated with him. They have been running around together all the fall. He is doing a political novel now, and I accuse Oliver of sitting for the portrait of the hero. But here they are."
The two men came in from the library with red buds in their buttonholes. Oliver as usual saluted me with a volley of questions, which he gave me no time to answer, and with an animating smile, in which I always feel a slightly satirical
