kling Burgundy, the expensive and
effervescent white wines. When he drank he could drink a great deal,
and he ate in proportion. Nothing must be served but the
best--soup, fish, entree, roast, game, dessert--everything
that made up a showy dinner and he had long since determined that only
a high-priced chef was worth while. They had found an old cordon
bleu, Louis Berdot, who had served in the house of one of the
great dry goods princes, and this man he engaged. He cost Lester a
hundred dollars a week, but his reply to any question was that he only
had one life to live.

The trouble with this attitude was that it adjusted nothing,
improved nothing, left everything to drift on toward an indefinite
end. If Lester had married Jennie and accepted the comparatively
meager income of ten thousand a year he would have maintained the same
attitude to the end. It would have led him to a stolid indifference to
the social world of which now necessarily he was a part. He would have
drifted on with a few mentally compatible cronies who would have
accepted him for what he was--a good fellow--and Jennie in
the end would not have been so much better off than she was now.

One of the changes which was interesting was that the Kanes
transferred their residence to New York. Mrs. Kane had become very
intimate with a group of clever women in the Eastern four hundred, or
nine hundred, and had been advised and urged to transfer the scene of
her activities to New York. She finally did so, leasing a house in
Seventy-eighth Street, near Madison Avenue. She installed a novelty
for her, a complete staff of liveried servants, after the English
fashion, and had the rooms of her house done in correlative periods.
Lester smiled at her vanity and love of show.

"You talk about your democracy," he grunted one day. "You have as
much democracy as I have religion, and that's none at all."

"Why, how you talk!" she denied. "I am democratic. We all run in
classes. You do. I'm merely accepting the logic of the situation."

"The logic of your grandmother! Do you call a butler and doorman in
red velvet a part of the necessity of the occasion?"

"I certainly do," she replied. "Maybe not the necessity exactly,
but the spirit surely. Why should you quarrel? You're the first one to
insist on perfection--to quarrel if there is any flaw in the
order of things."

"You never heard me quarrel."

"Oh, I don't mean that literally. But you demand
perfection--the