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loved to go there. Peg amused him always, Johnny he was enormously fond of, and their host of friends he found exactly to his taste. There was a special brand of informality about the Havens's parties. Everyone was expected to do just what he pleased in that apartment, and did so. People came if, and when, they wanted to, entertained themselves according to the dictates of their fancies, and departed at such time as they saw fit. They danced, and sang, and stirred weird concoctions on the kitchenette range, and played stud poker on the dining room table, and made light love in the hall, and laughed. . . . Nowhere under the sun, Jock thought, was there ever quite so much laughter. Into this environment he had taken Yvonne one afternoon around Christmas time, and he was left with a distressing belief that the experiment had not been successful. Yvonne had been an onlooker, not a participant; and the crowd resented onlookers, however lovely and gracious, on the ground that they "crabbed a party." The fun had been rather subdued that day, and Jock had known why and been both grieved and disappointed. He had felt that in this small but somehow not trivial matter, Yvonne had completely failed him.

Cecily would not fail him. She was fundamentally adapted to just that sort of thing.

He reached for the 'phone again with a view to calling Peg back and announcing the substitution, but thought better of it. "No use," he reflected. "They don't care who I bring, and anyway I'm going to see Johnny at lunch——"

It was the last Friday in January, and the luncheon engagement was a business one. Johnny's father was to be present, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not he agreed with his son that Jock would prove