ss Elsie
as a wit, and it was his habit--like the Italians at the opera--to give
his applause before the closing phrases were delivered.

"I guess that's right. You hit it that time. That's one secret a woman
can keep." He chuckled appreciatively.

Mrs. Pendleton laughed less spontaneously than usual and said, "It
certainly was a dangerous subject," that "she had been looking for
silver hairs amongst the gold herself lately." And again Elsie's eyes
were attracted to the hairs under discussion. For three months now she
had questioned that hair. At night it seemed above reproach in its
infantile fairness, but in the crude unkind daylight there was a garish
insistence about it that troubled the eye.

At that moment the door opened and Mrs. Hilary came in with her bonnet
on. She glanced around with frigid greeting.

"So I'm not late to dinner after all. I had thought you would be at
table. The tram was so slow I was sorry I had not walked and saved the
fare." She spoke with an irrational rising and falling of syllables that
at once proclaimed her nationality. She was a short, compact little
woman with rosy cheeks, abundant hair and a small tight mouth. Mrs.
Hilary was a miniature painter by choice and a wife and mother by
accident. She was subject to lapses in which she unquestionably forgot
the twins' existence. She recalled them suddenly now.

"Has any one seen Gladys and Gwendolen? Dear, dear, I wonder where they
are. They wouldn't go to church with me. Those children are such a
responsibility."

"But they are such happy children," said gentle little Mrs. Howard, who
had come in at the beginning of this speech. In her heart Mrs. Howard
dreaded the long-legged, all-pervasive twins, but she pitied the
widowed and impoverished little artist. "So sad," she was wont to say
to her intimates in describing her lodger, "a young widow left all alone
in a foreign country."

"But one would hardly call America a foreign country to an
Englishwoman," one friend had interpolated at this point.

"Yes, I know," Mrs. Howard had acknowledged, "but she _seems_ foreign.
Her husband was an American, I believe, and he evidently left her with
almost nothing. He must have been very unkind to her, she has such a
dislike of Americans. She wasn't able to give the regular price for the
rooms, but I couldn't refuse her--I felt so sorry for her."

Mrs. Howard liked to "feel sorry for" people. Yet she was apt to find
herself at sea in attempt