d his party all a fizzle unless you come, and his gai'ty a
mockery! Well!"

Such indeed was the way in which Vivian had been pleased to depict his
fashionable uncle's attitude. He smiled slightly, sipped his feeble
coffee and said:

"Bear in mind that he's a bad, bad (though personally not displeasing)
old man, ridden by ruinous ideas about the almightiness of the dollar,
or lucre as we term it.... I have observed for some time that he desires
to corrupt me with his Persian luxuries."

"Persian! Well, I never!"

Mrs. G., a stout woman and a dress-reformer by the look of her, got hot
corn muffins from the kitchenette in the corner, and added:

"Them rugs is beautiful."

"He said lux'ries, mommer, like lowneg dresses, and tchampagne, and
ice-cream all like animals," said Kern.

"I do declare! Well, they do say the mawls of some of them swells is
something nawful. Not alloodin' to your uncle now, well, of
course, sir."

"I know a girl named Sadie Whirtle," continued Kern, "and there was a
man named Toatwood made a lot of money, corntracting, and his wife she
took some of the money and went to Europe in a steamer and stayed more'n
two months buying clo'es. And one day Sadie Whirtle goes up to him and
says, 'Mist' Toatwood, hear your wife's come home with some fine
Parisian clo'es.' And Mist' Toatwood says, 'Shucks'--on'y he says
somep'n worse'n shucks--'Shucks,' says he, 'why, my wife never been to
Persia in her life.'"

Kern was eighteen, with six years of bread-winning behind her, but she
told her story exactly in the manner of a child of eight. That is to
say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without
feeling, the slightest amusement in it, and at the end, continuing quite
grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring
interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression made the doctor laugh,
which seemed, of late, to be the object in life of all Kern's anecdotes.

"Where'd you get that story, Corinne?"

His odd habit of so calling her had often been privately discussed
between Kern and her mother, who had so long ago shortened their own
original Kurrin that even that had passed from memory. They had
concluded that this was only one of his jokey gempman's ways.

"Off Sadie Whirtle," said Kern, rocking backward and forward in her
chair. "On'y I don't see anything comical in it."

And then she giggled for some time.

The talk and stoo went forward cheerfully. Beside the