CHAPTER IVMeanwhile Craig had gotten himself into irreproachable evening wear, and shaken himself into his big fur-lined coat, and set forth into forbidding darkness to drive the long miles between his home and his dinner. The Dwyers were enormously wealthy friends from New York, who had a country place near Philadelphia, where they occasionally gave winter house-parties, inviting—as Craig well knew—a decidedly mixed crowd of the younger social set, the older crowd, his own crowd, of visiting Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians, of writers, actors, dancers, and notabilities generally, and trusting, as Mrs. Dwyer amiably and stupidly phrased it, that “after dinner, you know, when we’ve all had something to drink, you know, things’ll kind of warm up!”
Amiability and stupidity were indeed th
