Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she not? And you are
really fagged. You look it."

"I think it is only ill humor," I said, looking directly at him. "I am
angry at myself. I have done something silly, and I hate to be silly."

Max would have said "Impossible," or something else trite. The Harbison
man looked at me with interested, serious eyes.

"Is it too late to undo it?" he asked.

And then and there I determined that he should never know the truth. He
could go back to South America and build bridges and make love to the
Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?) and think of me always
as a married woman, married to a dilettante artist, inclined to be
stout--the artist, not I--and with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made
buttons and believed in the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of
me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was the other man's
wife and had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came
along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she had to
carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate and
matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at first to a
hands-off-she-is-my-host's-wife attitude at last.

"It can never be undone," I said soberly.

Well, that's the picture as nearly as I can draw it: a round table
with a low centerpiece of orchids in lavenders and pink, old silver
candlesticks with filigree shades against the somber wainscoting; nine
people, two of them unhappy--Jim and I; one of them complacent--Aunt
Selina; one puzzled--Mr. Harbison; and the rest hysterically mirthful.
Add one sick Japanese butler and grind in the mills of the gods.

Every one promptly forgot Takahiro in the excitement of the game we were
all playing. Finally, however, Aunt Selina, who seemed to have Takahiro
on her mind, looked up from her plate.

"That Jap was speckled," she asserted. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's
measles. Has he been sniffling, James?"

"Has he been sniffling?" Jim threw across at me.

"I hadn't noticed it," I said meekly, while the others choked.

Max came to the rescue. "She refused to eat it," he explained,
distinctly and to everybody, apropos absolutely of nothing. "It said on
the box,'ready cooked and predigested.' She declared she didn't care who
cooked it, but she wanted to know who predigested it."

As every one wanted to laugh, every one did it then, and under cover
of the noise I caught Anne's eye, and we lef