while she held him, quivering, in her arms.

BOOK TWO

Love and the World

CHAPTER I

THE PRINCESS CINDERELLA

When the society editor of "America's foremost newspaper," as in its
trademark it proclaims itself to be, announced that the Rodney Aldriches
had taken the Allison McCreas' house, furnished, for a year, beginning
in October, she spoke of it as an ideal arrangement. As everybody knew,
it was an ideal house for a young married couple, and it was equally
evident that the Rodney Aldriches were an ideal couple for it.

In the sense that it left nothing to further realization, it was an
ideal house; an old house in the Chicago sense, built over into
something very much older still--Tudor, perhaps--Jacobean, anyway--by a
smart young society architect who wore soft collars and an uptwisted
mustache, and who, by a perfectly reciprocal arrangement which almost
deserves to be called a form of perpetual motion, owed the fact that he
was an architect to his social position, and maintained his social
position by being an architect.

He had cooperated enthusiastically with Florence McCrea, not only in the
design of the house, but in the supplementary matters of furniture,
hangings, rugs and pictures, with the effect that the establishment
presented the last politely spoken word in things as they ought to be.
The period furniture was accurate almost to the minute, and the
arrangement of it, the color schemes and the lighting, had at once the
finality of perfection and the perfection of finality. If you happened
to like that sort of thing, it was precisely the sort of thing you'd
like.

The same sort of neat, fully acquired perfection characterized the
McCreas' domestic arrangements. Allison McCrea's income, combined with
his wife's, was exactly enough to enable them to live in this house and
entertain on the scale it very definitely prescribed, just half the
time. Every other year they went off around the world in one direction
or another, and rented their house furnished for exactly enough to pay
all their expenses. They had no children, and his business, which
consisted in allowing his bank to collect his invariable quarterly
dividends for him and credit them to his account, offered no obstacle to
this arrangement. On the alternate years, they came back and spent two
years' income living in their house.

Florence was an old friend of Rodney's and it was her notion that it
would be just the thing he