"All right, then, who cares?" he said, facing toward the "Great White Way." "Who the devil cares?" 

 And up in her room, with her hand under her cheek like a child, Joan had left the world with sleep. 

 

 

 PART TWO 

 THE ROUND-ABOUT 

 

 I 

 Alice Palgrave's partner had dealt, and having gone three in "no trumps" and found seven to the ace, king, queen in hearts lying before her in dummy, she wore a smile of beatific satisfaction. So also did Alice—for two reasons. The deal obviously spelled money, and Vere Millet could be trusted to get every trick out of it. There were four bridge tables fully occupied in the charming drawing-room, and as she caught the hostess' eye and smiled, she felt just a little bit like a fairy godmother in having surrounded Joan with so many of the smartest members of the younger set barely three weeks after her astonishing arrival in a city in which she had only one friend. 

 Alice didn't blind herself to the fact that in order to gamble, most of the girls in the room would go, without the smallest discrimination, to anybody's house; but there were others,—notably Mrs. Alan Hosack, Mrs. Cooper Jekyll and Enid Ouchterlony,—whose pride it was to draw a hard, relentless line between themselves and every one, however wealthy, who did not belong to families of the same, or almost the same, unquestionable standing as their own. Their presence in the little house in East Sixty-seventh Street gave it, they were well aware, a most enviable cachet and placed Joan safely within the inner circle of New York society—the democratic royal inclosure. It was something to have achieved so soon—little as Joan appeared, in her astonishing coolness, to appreciate it. The Ludlows, as Joan had told Alice with one of her frequent laughs, might have come over in the only staterooms on the ship which towed the heavily laden Mayflower, but that didn't alter the fact that the Hosacks, the Jekylls and the Ouchterlonys were the three most consistently exclusive and difficult families in the country, to know whom all social climbers would joyously mortgage their chances of eternity. 

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