over-bold by
success: "If you see the men rising to put them out, you may be sure
that they've been seated exactly an hour."

Ludlow looked across the bed of roses which filled two-thirds of the
table, across the glitter of glass, and the waver of light and shadow,
and said, "Oh, _you're_ there!"

The wit that had inspired the voice before gave out; the owner tried to
make a pout do duty for it. "Of course I'm there," she said; then
pending another inspiration she was silent. Everybody waited for her to
rise again to the level of her reputation for clever things, and the
general expectation expressed itself in a subdued creaking of stiff
linen above the board, and the low murmur of silken skirts under the
table.

Finally one of the men said, "Well, it's bad enough to come late, but
it's a good deal worse to come too early. I'd rather come late, any
time."

"Mr. Wetmore wants you to ask him why, Mrs. Westley," said Ludlow.

Mrs. Westley entreated, "Oh, why, Mr. Wetmore?" and every one laughed.

"All right, Ludlow," said the gentleman in friendly menace. Then he
answered Mrs. Westley: "Well, one thing, your hostess respects you
more. If you come too early you bring reproach and you meet contempt;
reproach that she shouldn't have been ready to receive you, and
contempt that you should have supposed her capable of dining at the
hour fixed."

It was a Mrs. Rangeley who had launched the first shaft at Ludlow; she
now fitted another little arrow to her string, under cover of the laugh
that followed Mr. Wetmore's reasons. "I shouldn't object to any one's
coming late, unless I were giving the dinner; but what I can't bear is
wondering what it was kept them."

Again she had given a touch that reminded the company of their common
humanity and their unity of emotion, and the laugh that responded was
without any of that reservation or uncertainty which a subtle observer
may often detect in the enjoyment of brilliant things said at dinner.
But the great charm of the Westley dinners was that people generally
did understand each other there. If you made a joke, as Wetmore said,
you were not often required to spell it. He celebrated the Westleys as
ideal hosts: Mrs. Westley had the youth and beauty befitting a second
wife; her social ambition had as yet not developed into the passion for
millionaires; she was simply content with painters, like himself and
Ludlow, literary men, lawyers, doctors and their several wives.

Gene