to
now, as he sat there looking down at her--at the wonderful hair which
framed her face and, in its two thick braids, the incomparable whiteness
of her throat and bosom--at the slumberous glory of her eyes.

So, when she asked him what he was looking so solemn about, he said with
more truth than he pretended to himself, that it was enough to make
anybody solemn to look at her. And then, to break the spell, he asked
her why she had laughed a little while back, over something she had said
about Robert W. Chambers' novels.

"I was thinking," she said, "of the awful disgrace I got into yesterday,
with somebody--well, with Bertram Willis, by saying something like that.
I'll have to tell you about it."

Bertram Willis, it should be said, was the young architect with the
upturned mustaches and the soft Byronic collars, who had done the house
for the McCreas. And I must warn you to take the adjective young, with a
grain of salt. Youth was no mere accident with him. He made an art of
it, just as he did of eating and drinking and love-making and,
incidentally, architecture. He was enormously in demand, chiefly
perhaps, among young married women whose respectability and social
position were alike beyond cavil. He never carried anything too far, you
see. He was no pirate--a sort, rather, of licensed privateer. And what
made him so invincibly attractive--after you had granted his other
qualities, that is--was that he professed himself, among women,
exceedingly difficult to please, so that attentions from him, even of a
casual sort, became _ex hypothesi_ compliments of the first order. If he
asked you, in his innocently shameless way, to belong to his _hareem_,
you boasted of it afterward;--jocularly, to be sure, but you felt
pleased just the same. The thing that had given the final cachet of
distinction to Rose's social success that season, had been the fact that
he had shown a disposition to flirt with her quite furiously.

Rose didn't need to tell her husband that, of course, because he knew it
already, as he also knew that Willis had asked her to be one of the
Watteau group he was getting up for the charity ball (the ball was to
be a sumptuously picturesque affair that year), nor that he had been
spending hours with her over the question of costumes--getting as good
as he gave, too, because her eye for clothes amounted to a really
special talent.

All that Rodney didn't know, was about the conversation the two of them
had