t
that she wished she'd started half an hour earlier. Even her husband
discovered it. He brought in a cigarette, left the door open behind him
and stood smiling down at her with the peculiarly complacent look that
characterizes a married man of forty when he finds himself dressed
beyond cavil in the complete evening harness of civilization, ten
minutes before his wife.

She shot a glance of rueful inquiry at him--"Now what have _you_ come
fussing around for?" would be perhaps a fair interpretation of it--and
asked him what time it was, in the evident hope that the boudoir clock
on her dressing-table had deceived her. It had, but in the wrong
direction.

"Seven twenty-two, thirty-six," he told her. It was a perfectly harmless
passion he had for minute divisions of time, but to-night it irritated
her. He might have spared her that thirty-six seconds.

She made no comment except with her eyebrows, but he must have been
looking at her, for he wanted to know, good-humoredly, what all the
excitement was about.

"You could go down as you are and not a man here to-night would know the
difference. And as for the women--well, if they have something on you
for once, they'll be all the better pleased."

"Don't try to be knowing and philosophical, and--Havelock Ellish,
Martin, dear," she admonished him, pending a minute operation with an
infinitesimal hairpin. "It isn't your lay a bit. Just concentrate your
mind on one thing, and that's being nice to Hermione Woodruff...."

She broke off for a long stare into her hand-glass; then finished,
casually, "... and on seeing that Roddy is."

He asked, "Why Rodney?" in a tone that matched hers; looked at her,
widened his eyes, said "Huh!" to himself and, finally, shook his head.
"Nothing to it," he pronounced.

She said, "Nothing to what?" but abandoned this position as untenable.
She despatched the maid with the key to the wall safe in her husband's
room. "Why isn't there?" she demanded. "Rodney won't look at young
girls. They bore him to death--and no wonder, because he freezes them
perfectly brittle with fright. But Hermione's really pretty intelligent.
She can understand fully half the things he talks about and she's clever
enough to pretend about the rest. She's got lots of tact and skill,
she's good-looking and young enough--no older than I and I'm two years
younger than Roddy. She'll appreciate a real husband, after having been
married five years to John Woodruff. And she's