"How warm it is to-night!" I heard Maitland Tait's voice suddenly proclaim, in a fretful tone, as if the women with him were responsible for the disagreeable fact. But he drew up a chair, rather meekly, and subsided into it. "This is the first really warm night we've had this summer."
"It seems like the irony of fate, doesn't it?" Anabel Sefton asked with a nervous little giggle. There are some girls who can never talk to a man five minutes without bringing fate's name into the conversation.
"We had almost no dances during April and May, when one really needed violence of some sort to keep warm," her mother hastened to explain. "And now, at this last dance of the season, it is actually hot."
"Of course!" Mrs. Sefton leaned toward the other two chairs confidentially. "A crush like this is too big," she declared.
"Oh, but I like the big affairs," Anabel pouted. "You never know then who you're going to run across! Just think of the unfamiliar faces here to-night! I happened up on Gayle Cargill and Doctor Macdonald down in the drawing-room a while ago—where they'd hidden to sing Italian, sotto voce!"
"Then Dan Hunter is here—for a wonder," her mother agreed, as if a recital of Oldburgh's submerged tenth were quite the most interesting thing she could think up for a foreigner's delectation, "and Grace Christie! Have you met Miss Christie, Mr. Tait?"
"Yes," he replied.
"She's gone in for newspaper work," Anabel elucidated.
"Just a pose," her mother hastily added. "She really belongs to one of our best families, and is engaged to Guilford Blake."