"I don't know about that," said Bojo, with an uneasy recollection of a certain alluring but rather obvious little actress, respectable but entirely too calculating to his way of thinking, whom Fred had been seeing entirely too much.
"Nonsense! That sort of person is always thinking of the crowd. Besides Gladys is too stupid to be jealous. It's a splendid match. She'll get a husband that'll save her house from being a bore, and he'll get a pile of money: just what each needs."
He saw Doris three or four times a week. She had become a very busy lady, constantly complaining of the fatigues of a social season. Fred DeLancy, who, with Marsh, had been admitted to intimacy, made fun of her to her face in his impudent way, pretending a deep solicitude for the overburdened rich.
"But it's true," said Doris indignantly. "I haven't a minute to myself. I'm going from morning to night. You haven't an idea how exacting our lives are."
"Tell me," said DeLancy, assuming a countenance of commiseration, while Bojo laughed.
"Horrid beast!" said Doris, pouting. "And then there's charity; you've no idea how much time charity takes. I'm on three committees and we have to meet once a week for luncheon. Then I'm in the show for the benefit of some hospital or other, and now they want us to come to morning rehearsals. Then there's the afternoon bridge class until four, and half a dozen teas to go through, and back to be dressed and curled and start out for dinner and a dance, night after night. And now there's Dolly's wedding coming on, and the dressmaker and the shopping. I tell you I'm beginning to look old already!"
She glanced at the clock and went off with a sigh to be decked out for another social struggle, as Mrs. Drake entered. The young men excused themselves. Bojo never felt quite comfortable under the scrutiny of the mother's menacing lorgnette. She was a frail, uneasy little woman, who dressed too young for her age, whose ready tears had won down the opposition of her husband, much as the steady drip of a tiny rivulet bores its way through granite surfaces. She did not approve of Bojo—a fact of which he was well aware—and was resolved when her first ambition had been gratified by Dolly's coming marriage to turn her forces on Doris.
At present she was too much occupied, for there were weak moments when Dolly, for all her foreign education, rose up in revolt, and others when Mr. Drake, incensed at the cold-blooded conduct of the pre-nuptial business arrangements, had threatened to send the whole pack of impudent lawyers flying. Patsie had been packed off on a visit to a cousin after a series of indiscretions, culminating in a demand to know from the Duke what the French meant by a mariage de convenance—a request which fell like a bombshell in a sudden silence of the family dinner.
It was a week before the wedding, as Bojo was swinging up the Avenue past the Park on his way to Doris, that he suddenly became aware of a young lady in white fur cap and black velvets skipping toward him, pursued by a terrier that had a familiar air, while from the attendant automobile a tall and scrawny spinster was gesticulating violently and unheeded. The next moment Patsie had run up to him, her arm through his, Romp leaning against him in recognition, while she exclaimed:
"Bojo, thank Heaven! Save me from this awful woman!"