ore calves, and more calves call for--well, we have all heard
them! I do not understand how a man who looks like Ambrose can so
stimulate cattle. Of course my cows are not as fine and fat as
Rowan's--that is not to be expected. The country is looking very
beautiful. I never come for a drive without regretting that I live
in town." (She would have found the country intolerable for the
same reason that causes criminals to flock to cities.)

Constraint deepened as the visit was prolonged. Mrs. Conyers
begged Mrs. Meredith for a recipe that she knew to be bad; and when
Mrs. Meredith had left the room for it, she rose and looked eagerly
out of the windows for any sign of Rowan. When Mrs. Meredith
returned, for the same reason she asked to be taken into the
garden, which was in its splendor of bloom. Mrs. Meredith culled
for her a few of the most resplendent blossoms--she could not have
offered to any one anything less. Mrs. Conyers was careful not to
pin any one of these on; she had discovered that she possessed a
peculiarity known to some florists and concealed by those women who
suffer from it--that flowers soon wilt when worn by them.

Meanwhile as they walked she talked of flowers, of housekeeping;
she discussed Marguerite's coming ball and Dent's brilliant
graduation. She enlarged upon this, praising Dent to the
disparagement of her own grandson Victor, now in retreat from
college on account of an injury received as centre-rush in his
football team. Victor, she protested, was above education; his
college was a kind of dormitory to athletics.

When we are most earnest ourselves, we are surest to feel the lack
of earnestness in others; sincerity stirred to the depths will
tolerate nothing less. It thus becomes a new test of a companion.
So a weak solution may not reveal a poison when a strong one will.
Mrs. Meredith felt this morning as never before the real nature of
the woman over whom for years she had tried to throw a concealing
charity; and Mrs. Conyers saw as never before in what an impossible
soil she had tried to plant poison oak and call it castle ivy.

The ladies parted with coldness. When she was once more seated in
her carriage, Mrs. Conyers thrust her head through the window and
told the coachman to drive slowly. She tossed the recipe into a
pine tree and took in her head. Then she caught hold of a brown
silk cord attached to a little brown silk curtain in the front of
the brougham opposit