He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair. “Are you sure it is?” he answered. “It would be so unreasonable.”!

There was a distinct challenge in Flossie’s eye as she asked the question. Joan felt herself flush, and thought a moment. Mrs. Phillips signed amid splutterings and blots. Joan added her signature as witness.

Joan looked at her. “I thought that sort of thing was dying out,” she said. Joan’s eyes followed. It was certainly an odd collection. Flossie, in her hunt for brains, had issued her invitations broadcast; and her fate had been that of the Charity concert. Not all the stars upon whom she had most depended had turned up. On the other hand not a single freak had failed her. At the moment, the centre of the room was occupied by a gentleman and two ladies in classical drapery. They were holding hands in an attitude suggestive of a bas-relief. Joan remembered them, having seen them on one or two occasions wandering in the King’s Road, Chelsea; still maintaining, as far as the traffic would allow, the bas-relief suggestion; and generally surrounded by a crowd of children, ever hopeful that at the next corner they would stop and do something really interesting. They belonged to a society whose object was to lure the London public by the force of example towards the adoption of the early Greek fashions and the simpler Greek attitudes. A friend of Flossie’s had thrown in her lot with them, but could never be induced to abandon her umbrella. They also, as Joan told herself, were reformers. Near to them was a picturesque gentleman with a beard down to his waist whose “stunt”—as Flossie would have termed it—was hygienic clothing; it seemed to contain an undue proportion of fresh air. There were ladies in coats and stand-up collars, and gentlemen with ringlets. More than one of the guests would have been better, though perhaps not happier, for a bath. “Shipping is my business,” he said. “I’m going to help sailor men. See that they have somewhere decent to go to, and don’t get robbed. And then there are the Lascars, poor devils. Nobody ever takes their part.”