A shade too heartily Bayard Husack said, “Hello, Chris! Well, this is pretty wonderful it’s great to see you you’re looking lovely as always, here’s Dina dying to see you. And Dina you’ve met Mrs. Ballantyne haven’t you, at least you’ve heard me talk—–”

Yes, and you’re talking a little too much this minute, Chris thought, rather ill-naturedly for her. The two young women looked at each other, their hands met. The conventional smile arranged itself on their faces, they looked at each other, the tall black-haired girl whose eyes were an unexpected blue, the blond girl with the startling black eyes.

“It’s wonderful to see you again. And on your home grounds. What an enchanting coat,” Dina Drake said. “And the hood. If Paris could see it they’d announce the new Alaska look.”

“It’s a parka,” rather lamely. “We pronounce it parky. Don’t ask me why.”

“All that white fur! It’s so dramatic. Like a costume in a musical.”

A poker term came to Chris’s mind. You’ve tipped your hand early again, as usual. Well, if that’s the way you want to play.

“Everybody wearing mink in Seattle, I suppose, Miss Drake,” Bridie observed blandly. She never was one to bother with preliminaries.

“This?” Miss Drake glanced down at herself, absently, as though just reminded of what she was wearing. “I got this last winter in New York.” In a tone that states a self-evident fact. She now removed her hat, collapsed it in some magic way, and thrust it into her coat pocket. She then drew over her head a soft mammoth mink hood which had lain draped below the neckline of the sumptous garment. The modeling of the face and the look in the eye were, perhaps, too modern and too motivated for that soft fur frame. Ott Decker, emotionally vulnerable but no fool, bustling up to herd the group indoors, peered politely at the fur-framed face. A dish, he decided, and lots of style, but she looks like the wolf in Red Ridinghood.

“Miss Drake,” Bay was explaining, a bit too spaciously, no one having asked, “is Dad’s second secretary. I mean Miss Gurkin wouldn’t come, she’s a bit vintage anyway for a jaunt like this, and of course Mother couldn’t possibly, so—–”

Whew! Chris thought. Elaborate. Aloud she said, politely, “And how is your mother, Bay?”

But Mayor Bogard was shooing everyone into the waiting room.

“Any you folks like a cup of coffee here, or a little drinky or something? The luncheon’s twelve-thirty but you prolly got up before breakfast ha ha!”

Distelhorst said, virtuously, never eat between meals; and patted his stomach.

Dave Husack held up a protesting palm. “They fed us every minute on that plane from the time we left Seattle. Coffee first thing, and then a big breakfast of ham and eggs and juice and fried potatoes and those sweet rolls—why don’t we ever have those at home, I wonder?—and coffee coffee coffee.” He talked always in a jovial roar; the nostrils of anyone within ten feet of him were pricked by the artificial woodsy leathery tobaccoy sugary costly emanation of a widely advertised toilet water called His. When he whipped one of his fine imported linen handkerchiefs out of his pocket people in confined places had been known to reel.