“H’m.  How well do you know her?”

“We are good friends.”

“Just about what you please, I should say, if you know her well, and make money out of her?”

“That is, jewelry?”

“Ye—­es.”

“Thanks.”  Peter turned.

“Who is she, Peter?  I thought you never did anything so small as that.  Nothing, or four figures, has always seemed your rule?”

“This had extenuating circumstances,” smiled Peter.

So when Peter shook hands, the next evening, with the very swagger young lady who stood beside her mother, receiving, he was told: 

“It’s perfectly lovely!  Look.”  And the little wrist was held up to him.  “And so were the flowers.  I couldn’t carry a tenth of them, so I decided to only take papa’s.  But I put yours up in my room, and shall keep them there.”  Then Peter had to give place to another, just as he had decided that he would have one of the flowers from the bunch she was carrying, or—­he left the awful consequences of failure blank.

Peter stood for a moment unconscious of the other people, looking at the pretty rounded figure in the dainty evening dress of French open-work embroidery.  “I didn’t think she could be lovelier than she was in her street and riding dresses but she is made for evening dress,” was his thought.  He knew this observation wasn’t right, however, so he glanced round the room, and then walked up to a couple.

“There, I told Mr. Beekman that I was trying to magnetize you, and though your back was turned, you came to me at once.”

“Er—­really, quite wonderful, you know,” said Mr. Beekman.  “I positively sharn’t dare to be left alone with you, Miss De Voe.”

“You needn’t fear me.  I shall never try to magnetize you, Mr. Beekman,” said Miss De Voe.  “I was so pleased,” she continued, turning to Peter, “to see you take that deliberate survey of the room, and then come over here.”

Peter smiled.  “I go out so little now, that I have turned selfish.  I don’t go to entertain people.  I go to be entertained.  Tell me what you have been doing?”

But as Peter spoke, there was a little stir, and Peter had to say “excuse me.”  He crossed the room, and said, “I am to have the pleasure, Mrs. Grinnell,” and a moment later the two were walking towards the dining-room.  Miss De Voe gave her arm to Beekman calmly, but her eyes followed Peter.  They both could have made a better arrangement.  Most dinner guests can.

It was a large dinner, and so was served in the ball-room.  The sixty people gathered were divided into little groups, and seated at small tables holding six or eight.  Peter knew all but one at his table, to the extent of having had previous meetings.  They were all fashionables, and the talk took the usual literary-artistic-musical turn customary with that set.  “Men, not principles” is the way society words the old cry, or perhaps “personalities, not generalities” is a better form.  So Peter