"O Mally!" Mrs. McFee lamented—"how perfectly stupid!"
"I know: isn't it? But I promised over a week ago. And anyway, it's partly your fault, getting up this little dinner to celebrate your robbery, and making me forget everything else I had on for tonight. . . . Now please don't budge—and I don't need Soames to put me out, either. I know where I left my hat and coat and how to open and shut a front door all by myself."
"You can take my car, Mally, if you'll send it right back," Pagan generously put in. "Liane and I have got to hop along, too, in a brace of shakes. That is, you're welcome to it if you find it waiting. I told Ben to be back around ten."
"Thanks, old soul; but I'll have no trouble picking up a taxi over on Park avenue. Besides, it isn't nearly ten yet."
Pronouncing gracious but hurried good-nights all round, Mallison was heard to pass through the entrance hall, in a more guarded and intimate tone, and a decidedly tender one, remonstrating with his hostess because she had insisted on accompanying him to the door.
"Consider the looks of it, Folly: Liane and Peter will think you've fallen for me at last."
"No fear," Folly returned with uncomplimentary composure: "they know better."
"Besides, anyone would think you didn't trust me . . ."
This rang a note so false as to cause the eyebrows of the secret audience to lift and knit. But Folly's frame of mind was too completely and openly petulant to permit of her being wary and discriminative as well.
"Trust you!" she mocked lightly. "I'd like to know why I should, the way you carry on with women . . . Oh! I'm not in the least taken in by this tale about Mrs. Stuyvesant Ashe, you know, I believe that's just bunk to cover up a heavy date with some other misguided female."