“These,” Carol announced, “are real Chinese masquerade costumes.  I got them from an importing shop in Minneapolis.  You are to put them on over your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into mandarins and coolies and—­and samurai (isn’t it?), and anything else you can think of.”

While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared.  Ten minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, “The Princess Winky Poo salutes her court!”

As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration.  They saw an airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers.  When she dropped her pose and smiled down she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride—­and gray Guy Pollock staring beseechingly.  For a second she saw nothing in all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men.

She shook off the spell and ran down.  “We’re going to have a real Chinese concert.  Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife.”

The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table.  Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm.  The music was a reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous.

Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup.

None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey.  With agreeable doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment.

Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired.  She had carried them on her thin shoulders.  She could not keep it up.  She longed for her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties.  She thought of smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought before it was quite formed.  She wondered whether they could for five minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top of Knute Stamquist’s Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his mother-in-law.  She sighed, “Oh, let ’em alone.  I’ve done enough.”  She crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer of ginger; she caught Pollock’s congratulatory still smile, and thought well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer; repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, “Happy, my lord? . . .  No, it didn’t cost much!”