h blushing ever so little, maintained an excellent front.
She certainly looked dainty and charming,--more specifically so than she
had ever looked; indeed, utterly the young bride. She was in morning
dress, to comply with her own edict against formality, and also to mark
her new, enthusiastic disapproval of the modern craze for luxurious
display; but it was a delightful, if inexpensive, dress. She had taken
considerable trouble over the family dinner, devising, concocting,
cooking, and presiding over it from beginning to end, and being
consistently bright, wise, able, and resourceful throughout--an apostle
of chafing-dish cookery determined to prove that chafing-dish cookery
combined efficiency, toothsomeness and economy to a degree never before
known. And she had neatly pointed out more than once that waste was
impossible under her system and that, servants being dispensed with, the
great originating cause of waste had indeed been radically removed. She
had not informed her guests of the precise cost in money of the
unprecedentedly cheap and nourishing meal, but she had come near to
doing so; and she would surely have indicated that there had been
neither too much nor too little, but just amply sufficient, had not her
absurd and contrarious father displayed a not uncharacteristic lack of
tact at the closing stage of the ingenious collation.

Moreover, she seemed, despite her generous build, to have somehow fitted
herself to the small size of the flat. She did not dwarf it, as clumsier
women are apt to dwarf their tiny homes in the centre of London. On the
contrary she gave to it the illusion of spaciousness; and beyond
question she had in a surprisingly short time transformed it from a
bachelor's flat into a conjugal nest, cushiony, flowery, knicknacky, and
perilously seductive to the eye without being too reassuring to the
limbs.

Mr. Prohack was accepting a cigarette, having been told that Ozzie never
smoked cigars, when there was a great ring which filled the entire flat
as the last trump may be expected to fill the entire earth, and Mr.
Prohack dropped the cigarette, muttering:

"I think I'll smoke that afterwards."

"Good gracious!" the flat mistress exclaimed. "I wonder who that can be.
Just go and see, Ozzie, darling." And she looked at Ozzie as if to say:
"I hope it isn't one of your indiscreet bachelor friends."

Ozzie hastened obediently out.

"It may be Charlie," ventured Eve. "Wouldn't it be nice if h