Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely nothing.

It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of his set had merely left her alone, that was all.

The affair had been far from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were, without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers.

Was it maliciously arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon the people who had elected her father to office?
"As if that mattered!" Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant sensation.

Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a mental aversion.
"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!" Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams or in the hidden country within his mind.