After dinner and cigars and cigarettes in the library, the talk dragged a little in duets.  The dinner had been charming, the house was lovely, the company was most agreeable.  All said that.  It had been so somewhere else the night before that, and would be the next night.  And the ennui of it all!  No one expressed it, but Henderson could not help looking it, and Carmen saw it.  That charming hostess had been devoting herself to Edith since dinner.  She was so full of sympathy with the East-Side work, asked a hundred questions about it, and declared that she must take it up again.  She would order a cage of canaries from that poor German for her kitchen.  It was such a beautiful idea.  But Edith did not believe in her one bit.  She told Jack afterwards that “Mrs. Henderson cares no more for the poor of New York than she does for—­”

“Henderson?” suggested Jack.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that.  Henderson has only one idea—­to get the better of everybody, and be the money king of New York.  But I should not wonder if he had once a soft spot in his heart.  He is better than she is.”

It was still early, lacked half an hour of midnight, and the night was before them.  Some one proposed the Conventional.  “Yes,” said Carmen; “all come to our box.”  The Van Dams would go, Miss Tavish, the Chesneys; the suggestion was a relief to everybody.  Only Mr. Henderson pleaded important papers that must have his attention that night.  Edith said that she was too tired, but that her desertion must not break up the party.

“Then you will excuse me also,” said Jack, a little shade of disappointment in his face.

“No, no,” said Edith, quickly; “you can drop me on the way.  Go, by all means, Jack.”

“Do you really want me to go, dear?” said Jack, aside.

“Why of course; I want you to be happy.”

And Jack recalled the loving look that accompanied these words, later on, as he sat in the Henderson box at the Conventional, between Carmen and Miss Tavish, and saw, through the slight haze of smoke, beyond the orchestra, the praiseworthy efforts of the Montana Kicker, who had just returned with the imprimatur of Paris, to relieve the ennui of the modern world.

The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people to keep it going.  At one o’clock in the morning Carmen and our friend Mr. Delancy and Miss Tavish were doing their part.  Edith lay awake listening for Jack’s return.  And in an alley off Rivington Street a young girl, pretty once, unknown to fortune but not to fame, was about to render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.