Between Miss Adrian’s eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia.  Pat must come each sally, mot, and epigram.  Every second of deliberation upon a reply costs you a bay leaf.  Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her nostrils to her mouth.  To hold her own not a chance must be missed.  A sentence addressed to her must be as a piccolo, each word of it a stop, which she must be prepared to seize upon and play.  And she must always be quicker than a Micmac Indian to paddle the light canoe of conversation away from the rocks in the rapids that flow from the Pierian spring.  For, plodding reader, the handwriting on the wall in the banquet hall of Bohemia is “Laisser faire.”  The gray ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is that of slain old King Convention.  Freedom is the tyrant that holds them in slavery.

As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for the shaker of Attic salt.  Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.

“Now while you are fed and in good humor,” she said, “I want to make a suggestion to you about a new cover.”

“A good idea,” said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his napkin.  “I’ll speak to the waiter about it.”

Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up.  As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter.  That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the dumb-waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion.  Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave.  Mrs. Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow on the train.  Miss Adrian hummed what is still called a chanson in the cafes of Bridgeport.  Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor’s smile, which meant:  “Great! but you’ll have to send them in through the regular channels.  If I were the chief now—­but you know how it is.”

And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.

Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the Idealia.  After he had gone she came down again carrying a small hand-bag, ’phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55 commuter’s train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat, and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.

She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate.  A bare, brown cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl-white, Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a coal-mine was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.