ou at mine. Jack says it's up to you
to represent the Fyfe connection, as he's too busy. I'll come over
to Seattle and get you, if you say so."

She capitulated at that and wrote saying that she would be there, and
that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want
Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby
quarters and practiced such strict economy in the matter of living.

Then there was the detail of arranging a break in her engagements, which
ran continuously to the end of June. She managed that easily enough, for
she was becoming too great a drawing card for managers to curtly
override her wishes.

Almost before she realized it, June was at hand. Linda wrote again
urgently, and Stella took the night boat for Vancouver a week before the
wedding day. Linda met her at the dock with a machine. Mrs. Abbey was
the essence of cordiality when she reached the big Abbey house on
Vancouver's aristocratic "heights," where the local capitalists, all
those fortunate climbers enriched by timber and mineral, grown wealthy
in a decade through the great Coast boom, segregated themselves in
"Villas" and "Places" and "Views," all painfully new and sometimes
garish, striving for an effect in landscape and architecture which the
very intensity of the striving defeated. They were well-meaning folk,
however, the Abbeys included.

Stella could not deny that she enjoyed the luxury of the Abbey menage,
the little festive round which was shaping about Linda in these last
days of her spinsterhood. She relished the change from unremitting
work. It amused her to startle little groups with the range and quality
of her voice, when they asked her to sing. They made a much ado over
that, a genuine admiration that flattered Stella. It was easy for her to
fall into the swing of that life; it was only a lapsing back to the old
ways.

But she saw it now with a more critical vision. It was soft and
satisfying and eminently desirable to have everything one wanted without
the effort of striving for it, but a begging wheedling game on the part
of these women. They were, she told herself rather harshly, an
incompetent, helpless lot, dependent one and all upon some man's favor
or affection, just as she herself had been all her life until the past
few months. Some man had to work and scheme to pay the bills. She did
not know why this line of thought should arise, neither did she so far
forget herself as