be disappointed."

"The widdy?" he asked. "Sure I'll be nice to her."

She looked after him rather dubiously as he disappeared in the direction
of her husband's room.

She'd have felt safer about him if he had seemed more subdued as a
result of his escapade. There was a sort of hilarious contentment about
him that filled her with misgivings.

Well, they were justified!

But the maddening thing was, she had afterward to admit, that the
disaster had been largely of her own contriving. She had been caught in
the net of her own stratagem--hoist by her own petard.

She had made it a six-couple dinner in order to insure that the talk
should be by twos rather than general, and she had spent a good
half-hour over the place-cards, getting them to suit her.

Hermione had to be on Martin's right hand, of course. She was just back
in the city after an absence of years, and everybody was rushing her.
She put Violet Williamson, whom Martin was always flirting with in a
harmless way, on his left, and Rod to the right of Hermione. At Rodney's
right, she put a girl he had known for years and cared nothing whatever
about, and then Howard West--who probably wasn't interested in her
either, but would be polite because he was to everybody. Frederica
herself sat between Carl Leaventritt of the university--a great
acquisition, since whatever you might think of him as an empirical
psychologist, there was no doubt of his being an accomplished
diner-out--and Violet's husband, as he vociferously proclaimed himself,
John Williamson, an untired business man who, had their seasons
coincided, could have enjoyed a ball game in the afternoon and stayed
awake at the opera in the evening. Doctor Randolph's pretty wife she
slid in between Leaventritt and Howard West, and, in happy ignorance of
what the result was going to be, she put Randolph himself between Violet
and Alice West. He was a young, up-to-the-minute mind and nerve doctor.

It was an admirable plan all right, the key-note of it being, as you no
doubt will have observed, the easy unforced isolation of Rodney and the
rich widow. Before that dinner was over, they ought to be old friends.

And, for a little while, all went well. Rodney came down almost within
the seven minutes she had allowed him, looking much less dreadful than
she had expected, in her husband's other dress suit, and not forgetful,
it appeared, of the line of behavior she had enjoined on him; namely,
that he was to be