imagine the existence of such a being, a
perfectly worldly wise and cynically minded baby, but twelve months of
late suppers and many plays had already blighted her rose-leaf skin and
sown three fine, nervous little wrinkles between her delicately arched
eyebrows. She was very vivacious, but, as Gerty Bridewell had observed,
it was a vivacity that was hardly justified, since possessing neither
the means nor the manner exacted by the more exclusive circles, she had
been compelled to compromise with a social body which made up in members
what it lacked as an organism. Her dash and her prettiness sufficed to
place her comfortably here, but beyond a speaking acquaintance with
Gerty, who confessed that she was too charitable to be exclusive she had
not as yet approached that small shining sphere whose inmates boast the
larger freedom no less than the finer discrimination. The larger
freedom, it seemed at times, was all of it that she was ever to attain,
for, venturing a little too boldly once or twice with a light head, she
had at last found herself skating gingerly over a veritable sleet of
scandal. She got herself rumoured about so persistently that from being
merely improbable, she had become, in Gerty's words again, "one of the
very last of the impossibilities." And of late Adams' friends had begun
to ask themselves quite seriously, "why in the deuce he didn't keep a
hand upon his wife." How much he knew or how much there was, in reality,
to know had become in a limited circle almost the question of the hour,
until Perry Bridewell had demanded in final exasperation "whether Adams
was ridiculously ignorant or outrageously indifferent?"

But if the curious had been permitted to observe the object of their
uncertainty as he stood under the full glare before his festive wife
they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner.
He regarded her with a frank, fatherly tolerance, in which there was
hardly a suggestion of a more passionate concern.

"Wrap up well," he said, as his glance shot over her, "there's a biting
wind outside."

Connie screwed up her delicate eyebrows and the fine little wrinkles
leaped instantly into view. There was a nervous irritation in her look,
which recoiled from her husband as from a blank and shining wall.

"I'm dining at Sherry's with the Donaldsons," she explained. "I knew you
wouldn't come, so I didn't even trouble you to decline."

"You're right, my dear," he rejoined ga