lacent Cornucopia. With the hope of rendering
himself more youthful for this belated adventure with the babbling
widow he had been treated by a hair specialist. The result was, as
usual, farcically pathetic. His nice white hair which had given him a
charming benignity and cleanness had been turned into a dead and musty
black which made him look unearthly and unreal. His smart and carefully
cherished moustache which once had laid upon his upper lip like cotton
wool had been treated with the same ink-colored mixture. His clothes,
once so perfectly suitable, were now those built for a man of Harry
Oldershaw's youthful lines and gave him the appearance of one who had
forced himself into a suit made for his son. It was of a very blue
flannel with white lines,--always a trying combination. His tie and
socks were en suite and his gouty feet were martyrized to this scheme
of camouflage by being pressed into a pair of tight brown and white
shoes. Having been deprived of his swim for fear that his youthfulness
might come off in the water and with the rather cruel badinage of his
old friend Hosack still rankling in his soul, the poor little old
gentleman was not in the best of tempers. Also he had spent most of the
morning exercising Pinkie-Winkie while his wife had been writing
letters, and his nerves were distinctly jaded. The pampered animal
which had taken almost as solemn a part of his marriage vows as the
bride herself had insisted upon making a series of strategic attacks
against Mrs. Hosack's large, yellow-eyed, resentful Persian Tom, and
his endeavors to read the morning paper and rescue Pinkie from certain
wreckage had made life a bitter and a restless business. He was unable
to prevent himself from casting his mind back to those good bachelor
days of the previous summer when he had taken his swim with the young
people, enjoyed his sunbath at the feet of slim and beautiful girls,
and looked forward to a stiff cocktail in his bathhouse like a natural
and irresponsible old buck.

Gilbert Palgrave faced him, an almost silent man who, to Cornucopia's
great and continually voiced distress, allowed her handsomely paid
cook's efforts to go by contemptuously untouched. It rendered her own
enthusiastic appetite all the more conspicuous.

For two reasons Hosack was far from happy. One was because Mrs. Barnet
Thatcher was seated on his right pelting him with brightness and the
other because Joan, on his left, looked clean through