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about poor people. He was the most sweeping person—she had never been so set aside since—since she came out. And he knew nothing whatever about her. Her thoughts flew to Trent Stoke and her protégés in the village.

“I know lots of poor people,” she said, “and they like me very much.” She knew it sounded babyish, and she was cross with herself for answering at all, but somehow she had to.

Tony smiled. He was in an impish mood. “Do you give them soup in the winter?” he asked. “And you drive round and say polite things—it’s very good of you, but those aren’t really the poor people that I was thinking about.”

Pamela flushed faintly, partly with annoyance, and partly because she did drive round and give soup and blankets to the old women of Trent Stoke. Was that any thing to be ashamed of? she thought indignantly. What did he want?

“I know them quite well, and understand them. I’ve known them all my life,” she said. “And you can’t possibly understand. That is the music of the next dance. We had better go back, I think.”

On the way back to the ball-room they talked mainly of decorations, and Tony studied the set of Pamela’s right ear from a pace behind her, and thought how pretty she was, and what a pity it was that she was so ridiculously young. Wherein he was quite wrong; it was rather charming of Pamela to be like that—but Tony was too young himself to appreciate it.

He thought about her a good deal on the way home, too. “I was an ass to talk like that, but somehow she started me by asking how I got there, and I never thought how queer that view would sound to a girl of her kind. I don’t know that I ever formulated my opinions before, but they have been there a good while. . . . Naturally