Mrs. Robson sat down with preening self-satisfaction.  Wearily the daughter dropped into the seat which Mrs. Condor proffered.  The name of Ned Stillman was not unfamiliar to any San Franciscan who scanned the social news with even a casual glance, and Claire had a vague remembrance that Mrs. Condor also figured socially, but in a rather more inclusive way than her companion.  At all events, it was plain that her mother, with unerring feminine insight, had placed the pair to her satisfaction.  Already the elder woman was contriving to let Stillman know something of her antecedents. She was Emily Carrol, also of Rincon Hill, and of course he knew her two sisters—­Mrs. Thomas Wynne and Mrs. Edward Finch-Brown!  As Stillman returned a smiling assurance to Mrs. Robson’s attempts to be impressive, a young woman in white arrived with ice-cream and messy layer-cake.  Unconsciously Claire Robson began to smile.  She could not have said why, but somehow the presence of Ned Stillman and Mrs. Condor at a table spread with such vacuous delights seemed little short of ridiculous.  They did not fit the picture any more than her beetle-browed, red-lipped Serbian who....  She turned deliberately and swept the room with her glance.  Of course he had gone.  It was not to be expected that he would descend to the level of such puerile feasting.  A sudden contempt for everything that only an hour ago seemed so desirable rose within her, and, in answer to the young woman’s query as to whether she preferred coffee to ice-cream, she answered with lip-curling aloofness: 

“Neither, thank you....  I am not hungry.”

Stillman looked at her searchingly.  She returned his gaze without flinching.

Claire Robson did not sleep that night.  She lay for hours, quite motionless, staring into the gloom of her narrow bedroom, her mind ruthlessly shaping formless, vague intuitions into definite convictions.  She could not put her finger upon the precise reason for her inquietude.  Was it chargeable to so trivial a circumstance as a stranger’s formal courtesy or had something more subtle moved her?  If the depths of her isolation had been thrown into too high relief by the almost shameful sense of obligation she felt toward Stillman for his courtesy, what was to be said of the uniqueness of the solitary position which the Serbian awarded her by singling her out for a sympathetic response?  Could it be that a vague pity had stirred him, too?  Had things reached a point where her loneliness showed through the threadbare indifference of her glance?  In short, had both men been won to gallantry by her distress?  In one case, at least, she decided that there was a reasonable chance to doubt.  And that doubt quickened her pulse like May wine.