“It’s nothing at all; really,” she said.  “I think I’ve been making rather a fuss about very little.”

Joan was relieved.  The struggling life breeds moods of depression, and such a mood had come to her just before Aline’s arrival.  Life, at that moment, had seemed to stretch before her like a dusty, weary road, without hope.  She was sick of fighting.  She wanted money and ease, and a surcease from this perpetual race with the weekly bills.  The mood had been the outcome partly of R. Jones’ gentlemanly-veiled insinuations, but still more, though she did not realize it, of her yesterday’s meeting with Aline.

Mr. Peters might be unguarded in his speech when conversing with his daughter—­he might play the tyrant toward her in many ways; but he did not stint her in the matter of dress allowance, and, on the occasion when she met Joan, Aline had been wearing so Parisian a hat and a tailor-made suit of such obviously expensive simplicity that green-eyed envy had almost spoiled Joan’s pleasure at meeting this friend of her opulent days.

She had suppressed the envy, and it had revenged itself by assaulting her afresh in the form of the worst fit of the blues she had had in two years.

She had been loyally ready to sink her depression in order to alleviate Aline’s, but it was a distinct relief to find that the feat would not be necessary.

“Never mind,” she said.  “Tell me what the very little thing was.”

“It was only father,” said Aline simply.

Joan cast her mind back to the days of school and placed father as a rather irritable person, vaguely reputed to be something of an ogre in his home circle.

“Was he angry with you about something?” she asked.

“Not exactly angry with me; but—­well, I was there.”

Joan’s depression lifted slightly.  She had forgotten, in the stunning anguish of the sudden spectacle of that hat and that tailor-made suit, that Paris hats and hundred-and-twenty-dollar suits not infrequently had what the vulgar term a string attached to them.  After all, she was independent.  She might have to murder her beauty with hats and frocks that had never been nearer Paris than the Tottenham Court Road; but at least no one bullied her because she happened to be at hand when tempers were short.

“What a shame!” she said.  “Tell me all about it.”

With a prefatory remark that it was all so ridiculous, really, Aline embarked on the narrative of the afternoon’s events.

Joan heard her out, checking a strong disposition to giggle.  Her viewpoint was that of the average person, and the average person cannot see the importance of the scarab in the scheme of things.  The opinion she formed of Mr. Peters was of his being an eccentric old gentleman, making a great to-do about nothing at all.  Losses had to have a concrete value before they could impress Joan.  It was beyond her to grasp that Mr. Peters would sooner have lost a diamond necklace, if he had happened to possess one, than his Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty.