r slim young shoulders the management of her
father's house. Moreover, in that aged town where, aside from a few
score new professors and their callow young assistants, everybody's
grandparents had played dolls and tin soldiers together, Dr.
Keltridge's absent-minded fashion of failing to provide his daughter
with a feminine chaperon had caused no comment whatsoever. Everybody
that one met out at dinner knew all about everybody else for several
generations. Either they were indigenous, and born knowing; or else,
imported and properly accredited, they took measures to inform
themselves at the earliest possible opportunity. All the other people,
whom one saw in church and in the street cars, did not count at all.

For that reason, no one appeared to find it at all strange that, from
the day she put on long frocks, Olive Keltridge should preside,
unchaperoned, at her father's table, should receive her father's guests
without other protection from their wiles than that accorded by his
presence. To be sure, that presence was not invariably dependable. On
more than one occasion, Olive had been obliged to delay the serving of
the dinner and excuse herself from her waiting guests, while she went
in search of her father in his laboratory. The guests, though, as a
rule, had known Doctor Eustace Keltridge even longer than his daughter
had had the chance to do. They forgot their hunger completely in their
amused curiosity as to the condition in which their host would put in
his appearance.

Olive Keltridge was a born hostess. She had been prompt to grasp the
fact that guests should be amused as well as fed, prompt to realize
that a family skeleton can easily be converted to a family
Jack-in-the-box, if only he can be snatched from the closet and
manipulated with a little tact. Upon the first occasion of her father's
failure to line up beside her in season to receive his guests, she had
gone in search of him a little petulantly, had reappeared beside him,
hot-cheeked and a trifle sulky. That one experience had been the last
one of its kind, however. Olive had lain awake, that night, to ponder
on the interval between the time of her discovering her sire, his hair
rampant, his necktie shockingly awry and his sleeves rolled up, messing
contentedly among his pots and pans of cultures and totally oblivious
of his waiting guests, and the much later time when she had literally
driven him, irreproachably clad and beaming delightedly, into