Vance still hesitated. "Do you think I'll like her?" he asked oddly; and Halo laughed and wrinkled her shortsighted eyes. "Does one have to—at parties?"

"I don't know, I've never been to a party before—like this."

"Well, the important thing is that she should like you."

"Why?"

She gave a slight shrug, and at that moment the golden lady swayed across the room and came up to them. "He hates the very idea, Halo—I knew he would!" she cried.

"Vance, this is Mrs. Pulsifer. Jet, be good to him—he's my particular friend. Take her over to that quiet corner under the Buddha, Vance, and tell her how you write your stories." She swept away to her other guests, and Vance found himself seated on a divan in a dim recess, with this long golden woman, half frightened and half forthcoming, and swaying toward him like a wind-swept branch. For a moment he had been annoyed at his hostess's request. As soon as he had entered he had gone straight back to the shelves from which, a few weeks earlier, Halo had taken down Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Near them, he remembered noticing, were the Gogols, and there was one, "The Cloak," which he heard the fellows at the Cocoanut Tree talking about ("All Tolstoy and Tchehov came out of 'The Cloak,'" the advanced ones said. Well, he must read "The Cloak" then—) As soon as his eyes lit on that shelf he forgot where he was, and that there were other people about. He stood running his hands along the backs of the volumes in the happy agitation produced by the sight of unexplored bookshelves; and then Mrs. Tarrant came and spoilt it all… .

But now a new wave of sensation swept over him. The nearness of this strange Mrs. Pulsifer, her small feverish face, the careless splendour of her dress, the perfume it gave out, had caught his restless imagination. She interested and excited him as part of the unfamiliar setting which he had hardly noticed on his arrival because the books had thrust themselves between, but which now stole on him with the magic of low lights, half tints, easy greetings, allusive phrases, young women made for leisure and luxury, young men moving among them lightly and familiarly. The atmosphere was new to Vance—and this woman, neither young nor old, beautiful nor ugly, but curious, remote, like a picture or a statue come down from some storied palace wall, seemed to embody everything in the scene that was unintelligible and captivating.

"Oh, but I'm sure you oughtn't," she murmured, drooping away but leaving her eyes close to his.

"Oughtn't what?" he stammered, entangled in his confusion.