Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped. Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to Receive Aviators at Tea.
And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.
At home, early that evening, Carl's doctor-landlord gave him the message that a Miss Gertrude Cowles had called him up, but had declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the corner drug-store to telephone Gertie, instead of giving him a chance to listen.
"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything better to do."
Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went up to Gertie's.
They were all there--Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi, explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they said it.
The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a cockroach with a ruler.
As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"
They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened. He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.