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And Mrs. Hamill always retorted, "No. I don't. But a woman who conducts a gambling joint, however exclusive and dignified, is nothing more or less than—a woman who conducts a gambling joint! Jock would hate the idea, and he isn't going to find out if I can help it."

Feminine logic, and therefore irrefutable.

This night plodded on in the footsteps of countless identical nights that had preceded it . . . through a murk of smoke and a dizzying flood of blue-white lights, and a tattoo of talk, throaty, monosyllabic. Mrs. Hamill's smile became set, as though she had painted its tilt with a lipstick and said to it, "Stay that way, darn you!" She was very weary. Her orange satin slippers were little gay prisons of pain, and her head swam. She consulted a watch in a diamond nest on her wrist, and promptly felt wearier. Three o'clock only . . . and no one ever left before five. . . .

She turned, and between lanes of rigid, preoccupied backs made her way into the hall. There for an instant she stood irresolute. Her impulse to rush through the door and refresh her smoke-choked lungs with gasps of outside air was succeeded by a saner second thought; outside air would be perilous, it being February and three a. m. . . . Mrs. Hamill was careful of herself, as she was of all exquisite fragile things. She hurried upstairs, returning swathed in fur from her ankles to her ears.

She opened the huge front door and stepped out and very nearly, but not quite, collided with her son Jock.

The type of mind that had ever enabled her to meet life calmly, resourcefully, gamely in the face of defeat, served her now. She reached back without too