all about and what after all's the use.... While you, you
baby! are going to find out."

What Rose wanted to do was to gather her sister up in her arms and kiss
her. But the faint ironic smile on Portia's fine lips, the twist of her
eyebrows, the poise of her body as she sat up in bed watching the
blue-brown smoke rising in a straight thin line from her diminishing
cigarette, combined to make such a demonstration altogether impossible.

"Mother thinks, I guess," she said, to break the silence, "that I ought
to have looked a little longer. She thinks Rodney would have 'wanted' me
more, if I hadn't thrown myself at him like that."

Portia extinguished her cigarette in a little ash-tray, and began
unpacking her pillows before she spoke. "I don't know," she said at
last. "It's been said for a long time that the only way to make a man
want anything very wildly, is to make him think it's desperately hard to
get. But I suspect there are other ways. I don't believe you'll ever
have any trouble making him 'want' you as much as you like."

The color kept mounting higher and higher in the girl's face during the
moment of silence while she pondered this remark. "Why should I--make
him want me?--Any more than ... I think that's rather--horrid, Portia."

Portia gave a little shiver and huddled down into her blankets. "You
don't put things out of existence by deciding they're horrid, child,"
she said. "Open my window, will you? And throw out that cigarette.
There. Now, kiss me and run along to bye-bye. And forget my nonsense."

CHAPTER VIII

RODNEY'S EXPERIMENT

The wedding was set for the first week in June. And the decision,
instantly acquiesced in by everybody, was that it was to be as quiet--as
strictly a family affair--as possible. The recentness of the death of
Rodney's mother gave an adequate excuse for such an arrangement, but the
comparative narrowness of the Stantons' domestic resources enforced it.
Indeed, the notion of even a simple wedding into the Aldrich family left
Portia rather aghast.

But this feeling was largely allayed by Frederica's first call. Being a
celebrated beauty and a person of great social consequence didn't, it
appeared, prevent one from being human and simple mannered and
altogether delightful to have about. She was so competent, too, and
intelligent (Rose didn't see why Portia should find anything
extraordinary in all this. Wasn't she Rodney's sister?) that her
conquest of the Stanto