who didn’t care to know them.”

The guest answered calmly and with brevity:

“I’m not talking about women. I’m talking about a woman—and she’s totally different.”

“Who is she, Bob?”

“How should I know?”

“I know a few of them—suppose you describe her.”

The stranger halted and looked at his friend and host with commiserating pity. When he deigned to speak, it was with infinite scorn.

“Describe her! Why, you fool, I’m no poet laureate, and, if I were, I couldn’t describe her!”

For reply, he received only the disconcerting mockery of ironical laughter.

“My interest,” the young man of the fence calmly deigned to explain, “is impersonal. I want to meet her, precisely as I’d get up early in the morning and climb a mountain to see the sun rise over a particularly lovely valley. It’s not as a woman, but as an object of art.”

On other and meaner days, the track at Churchill Downs may be in large part surrendered to its more rightful patrons, the chronics and apostles of the turf, and racing may be only racing as roulette is roulette. But on Derby Day it is as though the community paid tribute to the savor of the soil, and honored in memory the traditions of the ancient régime.

To-day, in the club-house inclosure, the roomy verandahs, the close-cropped lawn and even the roof-gallery were crowded; not indeed to the congestion of the grandstand’s perspiring swarm, for Fashion’s reservation still allowed some luxury of space, but beyond the numbers of less important times. In the burgeoning variety of new spring gowns and hats, the women made bouquets, as though living flowers had been brought to the shrine of the thoroughbred.

A table at the far end of the verandah seemed to be a little Mecca for strolling visitors. In the party surrounding it, one might almost have caught the impression that the prettiness of the feminine display had been here arranged, and that in scattering attractive types along the front of the white club-house, some landscape gardener had reserved the most appealing beauties for a sort of climacteric effect at the end.

Sarah and Anne Preston were there, and wherever the Preston sisters appeared there also were usually gathered together men, not to the number of two and three, but in full quorum. And, besides the Preston sisters, this group included Miss Buford and a fourth girl.

Indeed, it seemed to be this fourth who held, with entire unconsciousness, more than an equal share of attention. Duska Filson was no more cut to the pattern of the ordinary than the Russian name her romantic young mother had given her was an exponent of the life about her. She was different, and at every point of her divergence from a routine type it was the type that suffered by the contrast. Having preferred being a boy until she reached that age when it became necessary to bow to the dictate of Fate and accept her sex, she had retained an understanding for, and a comradeship with, men that made them hers in bondage. This quality she had combined with all that was subtly and deliciously feminine, and, though she loved men as she loved small boys, some of them had discovered that it was always as men, never as a man.

She had a delightfully refractory way of making her own laws to govern her own world—a system for which she offered no apology; and this found its vindication in the fact that her world was well-governed—though with absolutism.

The band was blaring something popular and reminiscent of the winter’s gayeties, but the brasses gave their notes to the May air, and the May air smoothed and melted them into softness. Duska’s eyes were fixed on the green turf of the infield where several sentinel trees pointed into the blue.

Mr. Walter Bellton, having accomplished the marvelous feat of escaping from the bookmaker’s maelstrom with the immaculateness of his personal appearance intact, sauntered up to drop somewhat languidly into a chair.

“When one returns in triumph,” he commented, “one should have chaplets of bay and arches to walk under. It looks to me as though the reception-committee has not been on the job.”

Sarah Preston raised a face shrouded in gravity. Her voice was velvety, but Bellton caught its undernote of ridicule.

“I render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s—but what is your latest triumph?” She put her question innocently. “Did you win a bet?”

If Mr. Bellton’s quick-flashing smile was an acknowledgment of the thrust at his somewhat notorious self-appraisement, his manner at least remained imperturbably complacent.

“I was not clamoring for my own just dues,” he explained, with modesty. “For myself, I shall be satisfied with an unostentatious tablet in bronze when I’m no longer with you in the flesh. In this instance I was speaking for another.”

He did not hasten to announce the name of the other. In even the little things of life, this gentleman calculated to a nicety dramatic values and effects. Just as a public speaker in nominating a candidate works up to a climax of eulogy, and pauses to let his hearers shout, “Name him! Name your man!” so Mr. Bellton paused, waiting for someone to ask of whom he spoke.

It was little Miss Buford who did so with the débutante’s legitimate interest in the possibility of fresh conquest.

“And who has returned in triumph?”

“George Steele.”

Sarah Preston arched her brows in mild interest.

“So, the wanderer is home! I had the idea he was painting masterpieces in the Quartier Latin, or wandering about with a sketching easel in southern Spain.”

“Nevertheless, he is back,” affirmed the man, “and he has brought with him an even greater celebrity than himself—a painter of international reputation, it would seem. I met them a few moments ago in the paddock, and Steele intimated that they would shortly arrive to lay their joint laurels at your feet.”

Louisville society was fond of George Steele, and, when on occasion he dropped back from “the happy roads that lead around the world,” it was to find a welcome in his home city only heightened by his long absence.

“Who is this greater celebrity?” demanded Miss Buford. She knew that Steele belonged to Duska Filson, or at least that whenever he returned it was to renew the proffer of himself, even though with the knowledge that the answer would be as it had always been: negative. Her interest was accordingly ready to consider in alternative the other man.

“Robert A. Saxon—the first disciple of Frederick Marston,” declared Mr. Bellton. If no one present had ever heard the name before, the consequential manner of its announcement would have brought a sense of deplorable unenlightenment.

Bellton’s eyes, despite the impression of weakness conveyed by the heavy lenses of his nose-glasses, missed little, and he saw that Duska Filson still looked off abstractedly across the bend of the homestretch, taking no note of his heralding.

“Doesn’t the news of new arrivals excite you, Miss Filson?” he inquired, with a touch of drawl in his voice.

The girl half-turned her head with a smile distinctly short of enthusiasm. She did not care for Bellton. She was herself an exponent of all things natural and unaffected, and she read between the impeccably regular lines of his personality, with a criticism that was adverse.

“You see,” she answered simply, “it’s not news.