“What are you laughing about?” he asked wistfully, leaning forward to see her face.

Geraldine glanced back across her shoulder.

“Mr. Dysart is trying to be impertinent,” she replied carelessly; and returned again to the impertinent one, quite ready for more torment now that she began to understand how agreeable it was.

But Dysart’s expression had changed; there was something vaguely caressing in voice and manner as he murmured: 

“Do you know there is something almost divine in your face.”

“What did you say?” asked Geraldine, looking up from her ice in its nest of spun sugar.

“You so strenuously reject the truthful compliments I pay you, that perhaps I’d better not repeat this one.”

“Was it really more absurd flattery?”

“No, never mind....”  He leaned back in his chair, absently turning the curious, heavily chiselled ring on his little finger, but every few moments his expressive eyes reverted to her.  She was eating her ice with all the frank enjoyment of a schoolgirl.

“Do you know, Miss Seagrave, that you and I are really equipped for better things than talking nonsense.”

“I know that I am,” she observed....  “Isn’t this spun sugar delicious!”

“Yes; and so are you.”

But she pretended not to hear.

He laughed, then fell silent; his dreamy gaze shifted from vacancy to her—­and, casually, across the room, where it settled lightly as a butterfly on his wife, and there it poised for a moment’s inexpressive examination.  Scott Seagrave was talking to Rosalie; she did not notice her husband.

After that, with easy nonchalance approaching impudence, he turned to his own neglected dinner partner, Sylvia Quest, who received his tardy attentions with childish irritation.  She didn’t know any better.  And there was now no time to patch up matters, for the signal to rise had been given and Dysart took Sylvia to the door with genuine relief.  She bored him dreadfully since she had become sentimental over him.  They always did.

Lounging back through the rising haze of tobacco-smoke he encountered Peter Tappan and stopped to exchange a word.

“Dancing?” he inquired, lighting his cigarette.

Tappan nodded.  “You, too, of course.”  For Dysart was one of those types known in society as a “dancing man.”  He also led cotillions, and a morally blameless life as far as the more virile Commandments were concerned.

He said:  “That little Seagrave girl is rather fetching.”

Tappan answered indifferently: 

“She resembles the general run of this year’s output.  She’s weedy.  They all ought to marry before they go about to dinners, anyway.”

“Marry whom?”

“Anybody—­Delancy, here, for instance.  You know as well as I do that no woman is possible unless she’s married,” yawned Tappan.  “Isn’t that so, Delancy?” clapping Grandcourt on the shoulder.