"Including yourself," said the lady, with a little moue. "The wretched man won sixteen hundred dollars from me last night; and he sat in his club window all afternoon, just to have the pleasure of laughing at me as I went by. I don't believe I'll play at all to-night - I'm going to make myself agreeable to Mr. Montague, and let you win from Virginia Landis for a change."

And then the Major paused again in his attack upon the soup. "My dear Mrs. Winnie," he said, "I can live for much more than one day upon sixteen hundred dollars!"

The Major was a famous club-man and bon vivant, as Montague learned later on. "He's an uncle of Mrs. Bobbie Waiting's," said Mrs. Alden, in his ear. "And incidentally they hate each other like poison."

"That is so that I won't repeat my luckless question again?" asked Montague, with a smile.

"Oh, they meet," said the other. "You wouldn't be supposed to know that. Won't you have any Scotch?"

Montague's thoughts were so much taken up with the people at this repast that he gave little thought to the food. He noticed with surprise that they had real spring lamb - it being the middle of November. But he could not know that the six-weeks-old creatures from which it had come had been raised in cotton-wool and fed on milk with a spoon - and had cost a dollar and a half a pound. A little later, however, there was placed before him a delicately browned sweetbread upon a platter of gold, and then suddenly he began to pay attention. Mrs. Winnie had a coat of arms; he had noticed it upon her auto, and again upon the groat bronze gates of the Snow Palace, and again upon the liveries of her footmen, and yet again upon the decanter of Scotch. And now - incredible and appalling - he observed it branded upon the delicately browned sweetbread!