"If we're here to help you, Selina," said Maud loftily, "we'd better get about it. There's more than enough of our sex for the evening as it is. I've been reading up and there's very little said about women as guests at either salons or conversaziones. The important thing seems to have been the men."
Amanthus showed more interest at this, but she seemed determined to be trying. "I won't come if you have Tommy Bacon."
Juliette was responsible for this. At the Friday evening dancing club she had burst forth to a group of them, impetuously, "What do you suppose Tommy Bacon here has just said to me? That Maud and Selina and Adele and I are the only girls he knows whose hand he can't hold when he wants to."
In the pause which had followed Amanthus had grown very red. They could not blame her now. Though Tommy measured suddenly against the requirements of a conversazione did seem very young, still his absence would leave them short.
Maud was rising to the demands of the moment again so visibly that her companions as visibly looked uneasy. But her suggestion this time was practical. On the previous Saturday afternoon she and Selina and Adele, out for a walk in the Indian summer briskness had met Culpepper Buxton and his three roommates out for a tramp also. The two groups had joined forces and gone sauntering out the sycamore bordered road that led up-climbing and down-rolling to the old monastery in its secluded and wooded grounds where Louis Phillipe in his exile for a time had stayed. It not only proved a pleasant occasion, the background of the French king lending color and romance to the setting, but it added three masculine acquaintances to the lists of the ladies—Mr. Cannon, easy and talkative, Mr. Welling, provocative and in spectacles, Mr. Tate, tall and studious. Older than their own set, decidedly these three young men were acquisitions.
"You must ask these friends of Culpepper, Selina," proposed Maud. "And do you believe if we coax Culpepper, he'll get Algernon Charles Biggs to come? At a conversazione, after it is understood by Miss Boswell who he is, he will seem to be a card?"
"The two groups had ... gone sauntering out the sycamore bordered road."