“I understand,” she heard a woman in front of her whisper to her companion, “that Devincenzi, the ’cellist, is the only one in the crowd who is getting a red cent.  But he has a rule, you know—­or is it a contract?  I’m sure I don’t know.  At any rate, they say that the Ffinch-Browns donated his fee....  The Ffinch-Browns?  Don’t you know them?...  See, there they are ... over there by the Tom Forsythes.  She has on turquoise pendant earrings....  Oh, they’re ever so charitable!  But they do say that she is something of a....”

Claire lost the remainder of this stage whisper in a rather tremulous anxiety to catch a glimpse of her aunt before she moved.  Claire had to acknowledge that at a distance her aunt gave a wonderful illusion of arrested youth as she stood with one hand grasping the collar of her gorgeous mandarin coat.  But Claire was more interested in the turquoise pendants than in her aunt.  She had never seen the jewels before, but she had heard about them almost from the time she was able to lisp.

“They’re mine,” Mrs. Robson had repeated to Claire again and again.  “My father bought them for me when I was sixteen years old.  I remember the day distinctly, and how my mother said:  ’Don’t you think, John, that Emily is a little young for anything like this?  I’ll keep them for her until she is twenty.’  I nearly cried myself sick, but of course mother was right, then....  But like everything else, I never got my hands on them again.  And what is more, Julia Carrol Ffinch-Brown knows that they are mine as well as anybody, because she stood right alongside of me when I handed them over to mother.  Not that I care....  It’s the principle of the thing!”

Claire felt disappointed in the pendants.  They seemed so insignificant—­to fall very far short of her mother’s passionate description of them, and she began to wonder which was the more pathetic, Mrs. Robson’s exaggerated notion of their worth or the pettiness that gave Aunt Julia the tenacity to hold fast to such trivial baubles.

Ned Stillman was in the audience, also.  Claire saw him sitting off at the side.  Indeed, she spotted him on the very moment of her entrance upon the stage.  She had been nervous until his friendly smile warmed her into easy confidence; and though, while she played, her back had been toward him, she felt the glow of his sympathy.  As Lily Condor and she swept back upon the stage for their rather perfunctory applause, and still more perfunctory bouquets provided by the committee, Claire could see him gently tapping his hands in her direction, and she was surprised when the usher handed her a bouquet of dazzling orchids.

“They must be for you,” Claire said, innocently enough, to Mrs. Condor.  “I don’t find any name on them.”

“That shows that you’ve got a discreet admirer, at any rate,” Lily Condor returned with that bantering sneer which Claire was just beginning to notice.  And the thought struck her at once that Stillman had sent the flowers.  She was pleased, but also a little annoyed to think he had so deliberately ignored Mrs. Condor.