"To China," she observed placidly. "Now I wonder What the reason for that is."
Cora snatched up the glossy photograph and thrust it between Margaret's shapeless black fingers. "That's the reason!" she said passionately. "He left me for just half an hour to meet her steamer--a princess--'great stuff if as per invoice.' Well, evidently she is as 'per invoice,' if he's going to China with her the first time they meet--he and his princess!"
Margaret took the photograph and studied it with irritating calm.
"I don't suppose there ever lived a human male who would not enjoy going to China with a princess," she said, and she almost smiled at the thought of their departure.
Tears were already running down Cora's cheeks. "What does it mean?" she said. "Are men incapable of permanent attachments?"
"Oh, no," replied Margaret. "Valentine's attachments are very permanent--only they're not exclusive. He will always want me when he's sick--and you when he wants to test his will power."
She stopped, for Thorpe had come into the room again. He had come for the photograph, which he now took gently out of Margaret's unresisting hand. She hardly noticed his action, so intently was her mind working upon the question of Valentine's health.
"Thorpe," she said, as if consulting a fellow expert, "do you think Mr. Bing is strong enough to make this journey?"
For the first time Thorpe allowed himself a smile--a faint fleeting lighting of the eyes.
"Oh, yes, madam," he said. "I think now Mr. Bing is quite himself--quite normal. And then, madam, I shall be with him."
The Torbys were giving a large dinner-party, and a scarlet carpet was rolled out from the glass and iron of their grilled door to the curb of the Fifth Avenue gutter--a carpet as red as a cardinal's robe, as the flags in the Bolshevist meeting which was being held simultaneously two miles away in Madison Square and giving the police a good deal of trouble.
It was customary to put on new clothes and treasured jewels for the Torby parties, for they gave very good parties; they were fashionable, and as they had been important, financially and socially, in New York for two generations, and as most other New Yorkers had only lived there a year or two, the Torbys were generally assumed to be as aboriginal as the rocks of Manhattan Island.