iastic.

Best of all, Owen arrived early, irreproachably dressed, if a little
uncomfortable in his evening clothes, and confided to Sandy that he had
had a "rotten time" with Miss Satterlee.

"But she's just the sort of little cat that catches a dear, great big
idiot like Owen," said Sandy to her mother, when the older woman had
come in to watch the younger slip into her gown for the evening's
affair.

"Look out, dear, or I will begin to suspect you of a tendresse in that
direction!" the mother said archly.

"For Owen?" Sandy raised surprised brows. "I'm mad about him, I'd marry
him to-night!" she went on calmly.

"If you really cared, dear, you couldn't use that tone," her mother
said uncomfortably. "Love comes only once, REAL love, that is--"

"Oh, Mother! There's no such thing as real love," Sandy said
impatiently. "I know ten good, nice men I would marry, and I'll bet you
did, too, years ago, only you weren't brought up to admit it! But I
like Owen best, and it makes me sick to see a person like Rose
Satterlee annexing him. She'll make him utterly wretched; she's that
sort. Whereas I am really decent, don't you know; I'd be the sort of
wife he'd go crazier and crazier about. He's one of those unfortunate
men who really don't know what they want until they get something they
don't want. They--"

"Don't, dear. It distresses me to hear you talk this way," Mrs.
Salisbury said, with dignity. "I don't know whether modern girls
realize how dreadful they are," she went on, "but at least I needn't
have my own daughter show such a lack of--of delicacy and of
refinement." And in the dead silence that followed she cast about for
some effective way of changing the subject, and finally decided to tell
Sandy what she thought of Justine.

But here, too, Sandy was unsympathetic. Scowling as she hooked the
filmy pink and silver of her evening gown, Sandy took up Justine's
defense.

"All up to me, Mother, every bit of it! And, honestly now, you had no
right to ask her to do--"

"No right!" Exasperated beyond all words, Mrs. Salisbury picked up her
fan, gathered her dragging skirts together, and made a dignified
departure from the room. "No right!" she echoed, more in pity than
anger. "Well, really, I wonder sometimes what we are coming to! No
right to ask my servant, whom I pay thirty-seven and a half dollars a
month, to stop writing letters long enough to clean my sitting room!
Well, right or wrong, we'll see!"

But t