It was something to have achieved so soon--little as Joan appeared, in her astonishing coolness, to appreciate it.

The Ludlows, as Joan had told Alice with one of her frequent laughs, might have come over in the only staterooms on the ship which towed the heavily laden Mayflower, but that didn't alter the fact that the Hosacks, the Jekylls and the Ouchterlonys were the three most consistently exclusive and difficult families in the country, to know whom all social climbers would joyously mortgage their chances of eternity.

Alice placed a feather in her cap accordingly.
Joan's table was the first to break up.

She was a loser to the tune of seventy dollars, and while she wrote her check to Marie Littlejohn, a tiny blond exotic not much older than herself,--who laid down the law with the ripe authority of a Cabinet Minister and kept to a daily time-table with the unalterable effrontery of a fashionable doctor,--talked over her shoulder to Christine Hurley.
"Alice tells me that your brother has gone to France with the Canadian Flying Corps.

Aren't you proud of him ?" "I suppose so, but it isn't our war, and they're awfully annoyed about it at Piping Rock.