"What if the salt is an ambush?" queried MacGregor. "Besides, I never pretended to be a gentleman. Look over this menagerie carefully, guileless child! Do you suppose Julie usually selects her dinner-guests after this grab-bag fashion? Not to my knowledge. She loathes big dinners, so she has told me. It's her study and pride to bring together people of like tastes. The seating of a dinner-party is to her like a nice problem at chess. Do you think it a mere chance shuffle that settled your destiny at table? Do you know one automobile from another?"
"No."
"Of course not. And half the time you hadn't a glimmer of a notion what the decadent poet with the Vandyck beard was driving at?"
"More than half."
"Neither should I. A steady diet of the hash he serves up to women's clubs would land me in a padded cell. But perhaps the general talk amused you?"
"I could not make much of it," she admitted.
"Sensible girl! Neither could most of the talkers. But—here was where you scored a point—you looked as if you did. The minor poet and the motor-maniac couldn't wait their turns to bore you. Then, point number two, your gown. Logically, it's point number one, and a big point, too. I happened to be watching Julie when you arrived. Yes; you scored."
Jean caught gratefully at the tribute. She remembered that Craig had been too preoccupied with the Joyce-Reeves commission to notice her dress, and wondered whether the pictorial girl's æsthetic draperies had drawn his praise. She was shy of mentioning Miss Hepworth to MacGregor; he might think her jealous. Nor did he speak her name, though Craig and his dinner-partner, again in animated converse, were in plain view from their own station. Jean guessed that he trusted her instinct to light readily on the significance of this factor in Mrs. Van Ostade's strategy.
"Lastly," he enumerated, "you bagged Mrs. Joyce-Reeves."
"What! The woman who talked to me about Craig?"