afraid to ask why, for fear he should
say Mrs. Maybough sent it. Ludlow said he never took champagne, and was
awfully glad of the Apollinaris, and so the change was a great success,
for neither Charmian nor Cornelia counted, in any case; they both hated
every kind of wine.

Another time, Cornelia, when she came, found Charmian lighting one of
the cigars kept for show on her mantel. She laughed wildly at
Cornelia's dismay, and the smoke, which had been going up her nose,
went down her throat in a volume, and Cornelia had to run and catch
her; she was reaching out in every direction for help.

Cornelia led her to the couch, which was still waiting its rugs to
become a bed, and she lay down there, very pale and still, and was
silent a long time, till Cornelia said, "Now, if I could find a moose
somewhere to run over you," and they both burst into a shriek of
laughter.

"But I'm going to _learn_" Charmian declared. "Where did that cigar
go?" She sprang up to look for it, but they never could find it, and
they decided it must have gone into the fire, and been burnt up; that
particular cigar seemed essential to the experiment, or at least
Charmian did not try another.

They were both very grave after Ludlow came. When he went away, he
said, with an absent look at Charmian, "You have a magnificent pallor
to-day, Miss Maybough, and I must compliment you on keeping much
quieter than usual."

"Oh, thank you," said Charmian, gravely, and as soon as the door closed
upon him she flung herself into Cornelia's arms, and they stifled their
laughter in each other's necks. It seemed to them that nothing so
wildly funny had ever happened before; they remained a long while
quaking over the question whether there was smell of smoke enough in
the room to have made him suspect anything, and whether his
congratulations were not ironical. Charmian said that her mistake was
in not beginning with a cigarette instead of a cigar; she said she was
ready to begin with a cigarette then, and she dared Cornelia to try
one, too. Cornelia refused the challenge, and then she said, well, she
would do it herself, some day.

There was a moment when it seemed to her that the Bohemian ideal could
be realized to a wild excess in pop-corn. She bought a popper and three
ears of corn, and brought them home tied up in paper, and fastened to
some canvases she got for Cornelia. She insisted that it was part of
the bargain that she should supply Cornelia's can