of the hand that
rested upon it. The picture would have won a moment's silence from
anybody. And Barry and Jane simply gazed at her wide-eyed.

[Illustration: "Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"]

Rodney was the first to speak. "It's really the Lakes, Rose. I couldn't
quite believe it till I saw them. And the lady on the landing," he went
on, turning to his guests, "is really my wife. It's all a little
incredible, isn't it?"

When the greetings were over and they were on the way up-stairs again,
he said: "I told Rose we weren't going to dress, but she explained she
didn't put on this coronation robe for you, but for a treat for me
before I telephoned, and hadn't time to change back."

And when Jane cried out, as they entered the drawing room, "Good
heavens, Rodney, what a house!" he answered: "It isn't ours, thank God!
We rented it for a year in a sort of honeymoon delirium, I guess. We
don't live up to it, of course. Nobody could, but the woman who built
it. But we do our damnedest."

The gaiety in his voice clouded a little as he said it, and his grin,
for a moment, had a rueful twist. But for a moment only. Then his
untempered delight in the possession of his old friends took him again
and, with the exception of one or two equally momentary cloud-shadows,
lasted all evening.

They talked--heavens how they talked! It was like the breaking up of a
log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect
agreement for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and
hurling them forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in
collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic
spray of epigram. Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show,
inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as
Rodney's ally, sometimes as her husband's, and luring them, when she
could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, where she was more than
a match for the two of them. Jane could juggle Plato, Bergson and
William James, with one hand tied behind her. But when she incautiously
ventured out of this domain, as occasionally she did--when, for example,
she confessed herself in favor of a censorship of the drama, she was
instantly demolished.

"The state's got no business with morals," said Barry.

"That's the real cause of most of our municipal corruption," said
Rodney. "A city administration, for instance, is corrupt exactly in
ratio to its attempt to be moral. The more mora