e shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.

"Mamma!" Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that
she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. "Why don't you ask
me?"

This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. "I don't--" she
faltered. "Ask you what, Mary?"

"How I got along and what he's like."

"Mary!"

"Oh, it isn't distressing!" said Mary. "And I got along so fast--" She
broke off to laugh; continuing then, "But that's the way I went at it,
of course. We ARE in a hurry, aren't we?"

"I don't know what you mean," Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head
plaintively.

"Yes," said Mary, "I'm going out in his car with him to-morrow
afternoon, and to the theater the next night--but I stopped it there.
You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them while
YOU pretend to run away!"

"My dear, I don't know what to--"

"What to make of anything!" Mary finished for her. "So that's all
right! Now I'll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening and
tee-total. We could have lived a year on it. I'm not good at figures,
but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned
and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could manage at least twice
as long on the cost of the 'house-warming.' I think the orchids alone
would have lasted us a couple of months. There they were, before me, but
I couldn't steal 'em and sell 'em, and so--well, so I did what I could!"

She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother. "It
seemed to be a success--what I could," she said, clasping her hands
behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic
accompaniment to her narrative. "The girl Edith and her sister-in-law,
Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things on me.
The father's worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it. He's
what he is. I like him." She paused reflectively, continuing, "Edith's
'interested' in that Lamhorn boy; he's good-looking and not stupid, but
I think he's--" She interrupted herself with a cheery outcry: "Oh! I
mustn't be calling him names! If he's trying to make Edith like him, I
ought to respect him as a colleague."

"I don't understand a thing you're talking about," Mrs. Vertrees
complained.

"All the better! Well, he's a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody's
always known that, but the Sheridans don't know the everybodies that
know. He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sh