“Old Adams?” Kemper repeated the name, with a quickened interest.  “Well, I’d hardly envy him his experience with the sex,” he exclaimed.

“You would if you saw him—­he simply never thinks about a woman so far as I know, and at least he’s well enough rid of his wife, at last.  She’s on Brady’s hands, thank heaven!”

Kemper shrugged his shoulders.  “It serves her right, I suppose, but I shouldn’t care to be on Brady’s hands, that’s all.”

“Oh, he’ll chuck her presently, you’ll see.”

“And afterward—­” Kemper was leaning over Perry while he critically examined a pretty woman who was passing under the window.

“There’s no afterward,” laughed Perry; “you know how such women end.”

As he glanced at the note again, the bored and discontented look came back upon his face, and he tore the envelope carelessly across and flung it with a jerk into the waste basket.

“Pshaw! it’s all a confounded nuisance—­the whole business of sex,” he remarked as he rose to his feet.  Then while the disgust still lingered in his expression, a servant entered and handed him a second note written upon the same faintly tinted paper.  Immediately as if by magic his face was transfigured by the animated satisfaction of the conqueror, and instinctively his hand wandered to the ends of his fair moustache, to which he added an eloquent upward twirl.  From the condition of a mere sullen and dejected animal—­he sprang instantly into the victorious swagger of the complacent male.

“Sorry, but I’m in an awful hurry,” he remarked in his usual hearty voice.  “Look me up later in the evening and we’ll have a game of billiards.”

He went out, still twirling the fine ends of his moustache, and Kemper followed, after a short delay, to where his newest French motor car was waiting before the door.

A little later as he moved slowly amid the crush of vehicles in Fifth Avenue, it occurred to him that since Perry was so agreeably engaged, he might himself come in for a share of Gerty’s society, and stopping before her door, he sent up a request that she would come with him for a short quick run up Riverside.  Next to Laura herself he felt that he preferred Gerty because he knew that she would enter into a lively banter upon the subject that filled his thoughts, and his emotion was so fresh that there was a piquant charm in her sprightly allusion to the mere fact of its existence.  When she came down at the end of a few minutes, wearing her long tan motoring coat and a fluttering white chiffon veil, he felt a quick impatience of the first casual phrases with which she leaned back in the car and settled her hanging draperies about her.

“Go as fast as you like,” he said to the chauffeur, and then reaching into his pocket, he drew out his glasses and offered her a pair.

She shook her head, with an indignant gesture of refusal.  “If I perish I perish, but I won’t perish hideously!” she exclaimed.