transpired that one hour from the time that the young Mademoiselle Grez, who had registered at that large hotel with all of her luggage from the steamer while by lies her father was represented as still engaged with the customs, entered her room, there emerged young Mr. Robert Carruthers, who, after paying his bill in his room had a hall boy send his bags on ahead of him to the Pennsylvania Station while he sauntered into the tea room. I have never again met with the wonderful dresses I left in that hotel room. I hope the poor and beautiful domestic, who assisted me in cutting my hair into a football shortness after the mode of a very beautiful woman dancer which she said girls of much foolishness in America have affected, was rewarded with them.

And as I stood in the center of the great room of conversation and lights and flowers and music I again became the frightened girl upon the dock of America and I felt as if I must flee, but at that exact moment I beheld my Mr. William Raines of Saint Louis and my Mr. Peter Scudder of Philadelphia seated at a table in a very choice corner and there was a vacant chair between them. Upon each other they were glaring and before I had a thought I started towards them to prevent the carnage that had threatened on the boat.

CHAPTER III

THAT MR. G. SLADE OF DETROIT

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A number of moments in the rapid passing of the next few months I have wondered what would have resulted if I had taken that vacant chair between very agreeable Mr. William Raines and very proper Mr. Peter Scudder so evidently reserved for the young, beautiful and charming Marquise of Grez and Bye. I have decided that in about the half of one hour young Mr. Robert Carruthers would have been extinct and the desired and beloved Marquise in her place between them sipping her tea while making false excuses for forgiveness. I did not take that seat but I accepted one which a garçon offered me next to them and did regard them with both fear and wistfulness, also with an intense attention so that I might acquire as much as possible from them of an American gentleman’s manner.

“I suppose the dame’s fussing up for us to the limit, Peter,” observed that Mr. Saint Louis while he emptied a glass of amber liquid and removed a cherry from its depths with his fingers and devoured it with the greatest relish. “Gee, but the genuine American cocktail is one great drink! Have another, Peter. You’re so solemn that I am beginning to believe that belle Marquise did put a dent in your old Quaker heart after all.”

“There was something in that girl’s eyes as they followed us, William, that no cocktail ever shaken could get out of my mind,” made answer the very grave Mr. Peter Scudder of Philadelphia. “Do you suppose her Uncle got there or that anything happened? I wish I had waited with her.”

“Well, either Uncle did arrive or we’ll see her in the Passing Follies week after next, third from the left, in as little as Comstock allows. When I’ve had a good look at bare arms my judgment connects mighty easily with bare—”

By that moment I had poised in my hand a very fragile cup of nicely steaming tea and it was a very natural thing that I should hurl its contents in the face of that Mr. William Raines of the country of Saint Louis.

Voila! What happened? Did I stay to fight the duel with that, what I know now to call a cad, and thus be put back into the person of the Marquise de Grez and Bye for a wicked Uncle to murder. I did not. I placed upon the table two large pieces of money and I lost myself in the crowd of persons who had risen and gathered to sympathize with poor Mr. Saint Louis. No one had remarked my escape, I felt sure, as I had been very agile, but as I sauntered out into the entresol of the Hotel of Ritz-Carlton, to which I had given so great a shock in its stately tea room, a finger was laid upon my arm in its gray tweed coat. I turned and discovered a very fine and handsome woman standing beside me and in her hand she had a book of white paper with also a pencil.

“I was sitting just back of Willie Raines and I heard what he was saying about some woman, whom he and Peter Scudder had met on the boat over, not keeping her appointment with them. Peter is of the Philadelphia elect and nobody knows why he consorts with the gay Willie. I saw them come off the boat together this morning and I knew that the whole Scudder Meeting House would be in a glum over their being together. Would you mind telling me just why you soused your tea into his face? It would make a corking story for my morning edition. Did you know them or did you know the lady or did you do it to be launcelotting?”

“I think it must have been for the third of those reasons, Madam, but I am not sure that I know the word you use,” I answered with much caution.

“Launcelot, you know, the boy that was always fussing around over injured women, in Tennyson or somewhere, just for a love of ’em that was always perfectly proper. Nice of him but not progressive. Say, do you mind sitting down in a quiet corner of the tea room and telling me all about it? Are you French or Russian or Brazilian, and do you believe in women, or is it just because you like ’em that you threw the tea? I’ve got a suffrage article to do and I believe you’d make a good headline, with your militant tea throwing. Want to tell me all about it?”

“I have just one hour before going to the State of Harpeth, many miles from here, Madam,” I made answer with a great politeness. “I thank you but I must make my regrets.”

“Oh, I can find out all I want to know about you in five minutes. Just come sit down with me and be a good boy. Do you want to give me your name? I wish you really were somebody that had given Willie that tea fight.” And while making protestations and remonstrances I was led again into that tea room and seated at a great distance from the table which had been occupied by that Mr. William Raines and Mr. Peter Scudder, who had now departed. “If you really were some big gun it would kill Willie dead.”

“Then, Madam, permit me to present myself to you as Robert Carruthers, Marquis de Grez and Bye, from Paris on my way to visit my Uncle, General Robert Carruthers, of the State of Harpeth. I would very willingly by information or a sword kill that Mr. William Raines of Saint Louis and I regret that—that—” At the beginning of my sentence I had drawn myself up into the attitude of the old Marquis of Flanders in the hall of the ruined Chateau de Grez, but when I had got to the point—of, shall I say, my own sword?—I was forced to collapse and I could feel my knees under the tea table begin to shake together and huddle for their accustomed and now missing skirts.

“That’s fine and dandy,” answered the nice woman as she began to write rapidly upon the blank paper. “If you’d drawn fifty swords on Willie and he had knocked you down with the butt end of his teaspoon I’d have put Willie on the run in my write-up. Willie has handed me several little blows below the belt that I don’t like. Pretends not to have met me, when Peter Scudder’s own sister, whom I knew at the settlement, introduced him to me; and what he did to Mabel Wright, our cub on weddings—Oh, well, Mabel is another story. Now—that copy is ready to turn in when I pad it. I wonder if I will get a favor from the manager or be turned out of the tea room permanently for reporting a fight as aristocratic as this in the sacred halls of the Ritz-Carlton. I’d bet my shoe lacings that fifty people come here every afternoon for a week hoping it will happen again.”

“I do like this America, whose movement is so rapid,” I made remark as I set down my second cup of tea for the