thur, do you assume that Susan is
safe with Boz?"

"Well," she responded with a slow shrug of her shoulders,
"naturally----"

"Unnaturally!" snapped Maltby. "Unless forbidden fruit has ceased to
appeal to your sex. I was not aware that it had."

Phil's eyes were signalling honest distress. Susan unexpectedly rose
from her chair. Deep spots of color burned on her cheeks, but she spoke
with dignity. "I have never disliked any conversation so much, Mrs.
Arthur. Good night." She walked from the room. Phil jumped up without a
word and hurried after her. Then we all rose.

It seemed, however, that apologies were useless. Doctor Arthur had no
need for them, since he had not perceived a slight, and was only too
happy to find himself released from bondage; as for Lucette, her assumed
frigidity could not conceal her flaming triumph. As a social being, for
the sake of the _mores_, she must resent Susan's snub; but I saw that
she would not have had things happen otherwise for a string of matched
pearls. At last, at last her patience had been rewarded! I could almost
have written for her the report to Gertrude--with nothing explicitly
stated, and nothing overlooked.

Maltby, after their departure, continued truculent, and having no one
else to rough-house decided to rough-house me. The lengthening absence
of Susan and Phil had much to do with his irritation, and something no
doubt with mine. For men of mature years we presently developed a very
pretty little gutter-snipe quarrel.

"Damn it, Boz," he summed his grievances, "it comes precisely to this:
You're playing dog in the manger here. By your attitude, by every kind
of sneaking suggestion, you poison Susan's mind against me. Hang it, I'm
not vain--but at least I'm presentable, and I've been called amusing.
Other women have found me so. And to speak quite frankly, it isn't every
man in my position who would offer marriage to a girl whose father----"

"I'd stop there, Maltby, if I were you!"

"My dear man, you and I are above such prejudices, of course! But it's
only common sense to acknowledge that they exist. Susan's the most
infernally seductive accident that ever happened on this middle-class
planet! But all the same, there's a family history back of her that not
one man in fifty would be able to forget. My point is, that with all her
seduction, physical and mental, she's not in the ordinary sense
marriageable. And it's the ordinary sense of such things that runs the