Therefore, it puzzled and confused Neergard to be overlooked where the gay world had been summoned with an accompanying blast from the public press; therefore he had gone to Rosamund with the curtest of hints; but he had remained, standing before her, checked, not condescending to irritation, but mentally alert to a new element of resistance which he had not expected—­a new force, palpable, unlooked for, unclassified as yet in his schedule for his life’s itinerary.  That force was the cohesive power of abstract caste in the presence of a foreign irritant threatening its atomic disintegration.  That foreign and irritating substance was himself.  But he had forgotten in his vanity that which in his rawer shrewdness he should have remembered.  Eternal vigilance was the price; not the cancelled vouchers of the servitude of dead years and the half-servile challenge of the strange new days when his vanity had dared him to live.

* * * * *

Rosamund, smoothly groomed, golden-headed, and smiling, rose as Neergard moved slowly forward to take his leave.

“So stupid of them to have overlooked you,” she said; “and I should have thought Gladys would have remembered—­unless—­”

His close-set eyes focussed so near her own that she stopped, involuntarily occupied with the unusual phenomenon.

“Unless what?” he asked.

She was all laughing polished surface again.  “Unless Gladys’s intellect, which has only room for one idea at a time, is already fully occupied.”

“With what?” he demanded.

“Oh, with that Gerald boy “—­she shrugged indulgently—­“perhaps with her pretty American Grace and the outlook for the Insular invasion.”

Neergard’s apple face was dull and mottled, and on the thin bridge of his nose the sweat glistened.  He did not know what she meant; and she knew he did not.

As he turned to go she paced him a step or two across the rose-and-gold reception-room, hands linked behind her back, bending forward slightly as she moved beside him.

“Gerald, poor lad, is to be disciplined,” she observed.  “The prettiest of American duchesses takes her over next spring; and Heaven knows the household cavalry needs green forage . . .  Besides, even Jack Ruthven may stand the chance they say he stands if it is true he has made up his mind to sue for his divorce.”

Neergard wheeled on her; the sweat on his nose had become a bright bead.

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“What?  About Jack Ruthven?” Her smooth shoulders fluttered her answer.

“You mean it’s talked about?” he insisted.

“In some sets,” she said with an indifference which coolly excluded the probability that he could have been in any position to hear what was discussed in those sets.

Again he felt the check of something intangible but real; and the vanity in him, flicked on the raw, peered out at her from his close-set eyes.  For a moment he measured her from the edge of her skirt to her golden head, insolently.