t."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Lucy would exclaim.

"You needn't be. You didn't break my engagement. For heaven's sake,
Lucy, _you_ needn't take it so hard."

But she did. She simply brooded over me. She read to me, smiled for me,
and initiated every sally that I made into public. In conversation she
picked her way with me with the precaution of a cat walking across a
table covered with delicate china. She made wide detours to avoid a
reference or remark that might reflect upon my engagement. Will did
likewise. I lived in daily surprise and wonder. As a family we are
brutally frank. This was a new phase, and one of the indirect results, I
suppose, of my broken engagement.

What I am trying to arrive at is the change of attitude in me toward
Lucy. Usually when I visit Lucy I do just about as I please; refuse to
attend a lot of stupid student-teas and brain-fagging lectures, or to
exert myself to appear engrossed in the conversation of her intellectual
dinner guests.

I used to scorn Lucy's dinners. They are very different from Edith's,
where, when the last guest in her stunning new gown has arrived and
swept into the drawing-room, followed by her husband, a maid enters,
balancing on her tray a dozen little glasses, amber filled; everybody
takes one, daintily, between a thumb and forefinger and drains it; puts
it nonchalantly aside on shelf or table; offers or accepts an arm and
floats toward the dining-room. At Edith's dinners the table is long,
flower-laden, candle-lighted. Your partner's face smiles at you dimly.
His voice is almost drowned by the chatter and the laughter all about,
but you hear him--just barely--and you laugh--he is immensely droll--and
then reply. And he laughs, too, contagiously, and you know that you are
going to get on!

Incidentally at Edith's dinners silent-footed servants pass you things;
you take them; you eat a little, too--delicious morsels if you stopped
to consider them; but you and your partner are having far too good a
time (he is actually audacious, and so, if you please, are you) to
bother about the food.

There's a little group of glasses beside your water, and once in a while
there appears in your field of vision a hand grasping a white napkin
folded like a cornucopia, out of which flows delicious nectar. You sip
a little of it occasionally, a very little--you are careful of
course--and waves of elation sweep over you because you are alive and
happy and good to look upon; waves of