ly profane
terms--and concluded that Beatrice was paying the bill.

CHAPTER XI

It was April before Steve found himself visiting with Mary Faithful
again and admiring as heartily as Luke had admired the new apartment
Mary had chosen for her family.

It had, to Steve's mind, the same delightful air of freedom and
attractive shabbiness that he had come to consider as essential for a
true home. While Beatrice was launched on her new object in
life--making the house into a villa, from upholstering a gondola in
sky-blue satin and expecting people to use it as a sofa to having the
walls frescoed with fat, pouting cherubs--Mary had selected funny old
chairs and soft shades of blue cretonne found in the remnant
department, queer pottery, Indian blankets, and a set of blue dishes
which just naturally demanded to be heaped with good things and eaten
before an open fire at Sunday-night supper.

The whole expense came within Mary's economical pocketbook, yet it
seemed to Steve to have the combined richness of a Persian palace and
the geniality of a nursery on Christmas Eve.

He deliberately invented an excuse to call, some detail of work which,
more easily than not, could have waited until the next day. He was not
only using the detail of work as a means to visit Mary but as an
excuse to escape a parlour lecture on "What astral vibrations does
your given name bring you?" by a pale-faced young woman. The
pale-faced young woman boasted of an advanced soul and was making a
snug bank account from the rich set in undertaking occult analyses of
their names by which to decide whether or not the accompanying astral
vibrations harmonized with their auras; and if they did not--and were
therefore detrimental and hampering to spiritual development and
material progress--she would evolve occult names for them which would
be sort of spiritual bits of cheese in material mousetraps baiting and
capturing all the good things of this world and the next.

Convinced that Beatrice was not the proper name for her the Gorgeous
Girl had ordered a chart of cabalistic signs and mystical statements,
the sum total of which was that Radia was the name the astral forces
wished her to be called, and by using this name she would develop into
a wonderful medium. She paid fifty dollars to discover that she ought
to be called Radia and that her aura was of smoky lavender, denoting
an advanced soul--according to the pale-faced young woman, who had
tire