“Look here, chum, will you take me into Blunkers’s place some night, and let me hear you powwow the ‘b’ys?’ I should like to see how you do it.”

“Yes,” Peter said deliberately, “if some night you’ll let me bring Blunkers up to watch one of your formal dinners.  He would enjoy the sight, I’m sure.”

Leonore cocked her little nose up in the air, and laughed merrily.

“Oh, but that’s very different,” said Watts.

“It’s just as different as the two men with the toothache,” said Peter.  “They both met at the dentist’s, who it seems had only time to pull one tooth.  The question arose as to which it should be.  ‘I’m so brave,’ said one, ‘that I can wait till to-morrow.’  ‘I’m such a coward,’ said the other, ‘that I don’t dare have it done to-day.’”

“Haven’t you ever taken people to those places, Peter?” asked Leonore.

“No.  I’ve always refused.  It’s a society fad now to have what are called ‘slumming parties,’ and of course I’ve been asked to help.  It makes my blood tingle when I hear them talk over the ‘fun’ as they call it.  They get detectives to protect them, and then go through the tenements—­the homes of the poor—­and pry into their privacy and poverty, just out of curiosity.  Then they go home and over a chafing dish of lobster or terrapin, and champagne, they laugh at the funny things they saw.  If the poor could get detectives, and look in on the luxury and comfort of the rich, they wouldn’t see much fun in it, and there’s less fun in a down-town tenement than there is in a Fifth Avenue palace.  I heard a girl tell the other night about breaking in on a wake by chance.  ‘Weren’t we lucky?’ she said.  ’It was so funny to see the poor people weeping and drinking whisky at the same time.  Isn’t it heartless?’ Yet the dead—­perhaps the bread-winner of the family, fallen in the struggle—­perhaps the last little comer, not strong enough to fight this earth’s battle—­must have lain there in plain view of that girl.  Who was the most heartless?  The family and friends who had gathered over that body, according to their customs, or the party who looked in on them and laughed?” Peter had forgotten where he was, or to whom he was talking.

Leonore had listened breathlessly.  But the moment he ceased speaking, she bowed her head and began to sob.  Peter came down from his indignant tirade like a flash.  “Miss D’Alloi,” he cried, “forgive me.  I forgot.  Don’t cry so.”  Peter was pleading in an anxious voice.  He felt as if he had committed murder.

“There, there, Dot.  Don’t cry.  It’s nothing to cry about.”

Miss D’Alloi was crying and endeavoring at the same time to solve the most intricate puzzle ever yet propounded by man or woman—­that is, to find a woman’s pocket.  She complicated things even more by trying to talk.  “I—­I—­know I’m ver—­ver—­very fooooooolish,” she managed to get out, however much she failed in a similar result with her pocket-handkerchief.