Baldy wasn’t as bad as that, couldn’t ever conceivably be as bad as that, no matter how much he had had to drink.  Perhaps, if she had not been hypersensitive to-night,—­in an impossible mood for any sort of party really—­she might have failed to detect the familiar strain in his sensible, rather fatherly talk.  As it was, she thought she did detect it and it made her want to scream—­or swear!

There is one point to be urged in Baldy’s defense that Mary never learned to allow for.  Gin or no gin, the effect of contrast she presented to her surroundings in a place like this, her look of a seraphic visitor gone astray, would have given any one the impulse, at least, to rush to the rescue.  To begin with, it was not possible to credit her with the twenty-five years she truly claimed; nineteen, in a soft colored evening frock like the one she had on to-night, was about what one would have guessed.  Then, you never would have believed, short of discovering the fact yourself, how strong she was; her slenderness and the fine articulation of her joints made her look fragile.  Her coloring helped the illusion along, the clear unsophisticated blue of her eyes, the pallor of her hair that the petals of a tea-rose could have got lost in,—­it was, literally, just about the tint of unbleached linen—­and the pearly translucence of her skin.  If you got the opportunity to look close enough to see that there wasn’t a grain of powder upon it, not even between the shoulder blades, it made you think of flower petals again.  What clenched the effect was her healthy capacity for complete relaxation when no effort was required of her.  She drooped a little and people thought she looked tired.  She never could see herself like that and never made due allowance for the effect she produced, invariably upon strangers and not infrequently upon an old friend.

To-night, she lacked the name to label her mood by, rejecting rather fiercely the one that kept offering itself.  You couldn’t be homesick when home was the last place in the world you wanted to go back to—­the place you were desperately marshaling reasons for staying away from.

It was the non-appearance of her brother, Rush, that had brought a lot of dispersed feelings to a focus.  She had heard nothing later from him than the letter she referred to when she last wrote to her father.  She had expected a cable and it hadn’t come.  She had this morning gone over to Hoboken to meet the transport he had said he expected to sail on, but having got down to the pier a little late, after the debarkation had begun, she could not be sure that she hadn’t missed him.  So she had gone back to her tiny flat in Waverly Place and had spent the rest of the day there, vainly hoping that he would turn up or at least that she should get some word of him.  And sitting around like that for hours and hours she had, which was a silly thing to do, let her thoughts run wild over things—­a thing—­that there was simply no sense in thinking about at all.