"Grace, a salubrious evening to you," Sheldon bowed elaborately to the blonde. "May I present my gentlemen friends, Messieurs Lamb, Talbott, Carter and Clayton Bennington Garrity. Gentlemen—Miss Beach."
Grace Beach was the perfectly respectable daughter of the perfectly respectable leading paper-hanger of Tate, John Beach, and his colorless spouse. Grace had been a very pretty and modest girl in her day, which was about eight years before our story takes place. She was now twenty-six and her good looks were on the wane. She was suffering the fate of an erstwhile beauty who lives and has her social life in a college town. For ten years she had been escorted to dances and athletic games by Tate men. She had been engaged to a dozen of them. But when her fiancés graduated and left college, they seemed to have a discouraging habit of marrying other girls in other places. Grace was left behind.
Grace Beach was now trying to delude herself into believing that she was not confronting the specter of spinsterhood. She was only twenty-six, and yet already the younger brood of flappers in their 'teens were proving more attractive to Tate men than herself. Invitations to proms and football games came each year in fewer numbers. Grace had stepped out of her shell a little and became timidly
