lose to being a nonentity as anything I ever saw."

"Precisely why I selected him," drawled Carlotta. "I've got to marry
somebody and poor Herbert hasn't a vice except his excess of virtue. We
can't have another old maid in the family. Aunt Lottie is a shining
example of what to avoid. I am not going to be 'Lottie the second' I have
decided on that."

"As if you could," protested Tony indignantly.

"Oh, I could. You look at Aunt Lottie's pictures of fifteen years ago.
She was just as pretty as I am. She had loads of lovers but somehow they
all slipped through her fingers. She has been sex-starved. She ought to
have married and had children. I don't want to be a hungry spinster. They
are infernally miserable."

"Carlotta!" Tony was a little shocked at her friend's bluntness, a
little puzzled as to what lay behind her arguments. "You don't have to
be a hungry spinster. There are other men besides Herbert that want to
marry you."

"Certainly. Some of them want to marry my money. Some of them want to
marry my body. I grant you Herbert is a poor fish in some ways, but at
least he wants to marry me, myself, which is more than the others do."

"That isn't true. Hal Underwood wants to marry you, yourself."

"Oh, Hal!" conceded Carlotta. "I forgot him for a moment. You are right.
He is real--too real. I should hurt him marrying him and not caring
enough. That is why a nonentity is preferable. It doesn't know what it
is missing. Hal would know."

"But there is no reason why you shouldn't wait until you find somebody
you could care for," persisted Tony.

"That is all you know about it, my dear. There is the best reason in the
world. I found him--and lost him."

"Carlotta--is it Phil?"

Carlotta sprang up and went over to the window. She took the rose she had
been wearing, in her hands and deliberately pulled it apart letting the
petals drift one by one out into the night. Then she turned back to Tony.

"Don't ask questions, Tony. I am not going to talk." But she lingered a
moment beside her friend. "You and I, Tony darling, don't seem to have
very much luck in love," she murmured. "I hope you will be happy with
Alan, if you do marry him. But happiness isn't exactly necessary. There
are other things--" She broke off and began again. "There are other
things in a man's life besides love. Somebody said that to me once and I
believe it is true. But there isn't so much besides that matters much to
a woman. I wish there wer