“Why, I thought you wanted your fling first.” 

 And Dan, from his chair, in which, with a book, he had been sitting when Lady Galorey found him, answered cheerfully: 

 “Oh, I don’t like being alone. I want to go about with some one. I should like a fling all right, but I want to fling with somebody as I go.” 

 The lady of the house was not a philosopher nor an analyst. She had certain affairs of her own and was engrossed in them and lived in them. As far as Lady Galorey was concerned the rest of the world might go and hang itself as long as it didn’t do it at her gate-post. But Blair couldn’t leave any one indifferent to him very long, not unless one could be indifferent to a blaze of sunlight; one must either draw the blinds down or bask in its brightness. 

 She laughed. “You’re perfectly delicious! You mean to say you want to be married at once and let your wife fling around with you?” 

 “Just that.” 23 

23

 “How sweet of you, Dan! And you won’t marry one of these girls here?” 

 “Don’t fill the bill, Lady Galorey.” 

 “Oh, you have a sweetheart at home, then?” 

 “All off!” he assured her blithely, and rose, tall and straight and slender. 

 The Duchess of Breakwater had come in, indeed she never failed to when there was any question of finding Blair. 

 Dan stood straightly before the two women of an old race, and the American didn’t suggest any line of noble ancestors whatsoever. His features were rather agglomerate; his muscles were possibly not the perfect elastic specimens that were those muscles whose strain and sinew had been made from the same stock for generations. He was, nevertheless, very good to look on. Any woman would have thought so, and he bent his blond head as he looked at the Duchess of Breakwater with something like benevolence, something of his father’s kindness in his clear blue eyes. Neither of the 24 noble ladies vaguely understood him. His hostess thought him “a good sort,” not half bad, a splendid catch, and the other woman, only a few years his senior, was in love with him. The duchess had married at eighteen, tired of her bargain at twenty, and found herself a widow at twenty-five. She held a telegram in her hand. 

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