r my
friends to play with."

"This isn't play at all. It's very much earnest. Do be nice about it,
Ban."

"Betty, do you remember a dinner party in the first days of our
acquaintance, at which I told you that you represented one essential
difference from all the other women there?"

"Yes. I thought you were terribly presuming."

"I told you that you were probably the only woman present who wasn't
purchasable."

"Not understanding you as well as I do now, I was quite shocked.
Besides, it was so unfair. Nearly all of them were most respectable
married people."

"Bought by their most respectable husbands. Some of 'em bought away from
other husbands. But I gave you credit for not being on that market--or
any other. And now you're trying to corrupt my professional virtue."

"Ban! I'm not."

"What else is it when you try to use your influence to have me fire our
nice, new critic?"

"If that's being corruptible, I wonder if any of us are incorruptible."
She stretched upward an idle hand and fondled a spray of freesia that
drooped against her cheek. "Ban; there's something I've been waiting to
tell you. Tertius Marrineal wants to marry me."

"I've suspected as much. That would settle the obnoxious critic,
wouldn't it! Though it's rather a roundabout way."

"Ban! You're beastly."

"Yes; I apologize," he replied quickly. "But--have I got to revise my
estimate of you, Betty? I should hate to."

"Your estimate? Oh, as to purchasability. That's worse than what you've
just said. Yet, somehow, I don't resent it. Because it's honest, I
suppose," she said pensively. "No: it wouldn't be a--a market deal. I
like Tertius. I like him a lot. I won't pretend that I'm madly in love
with him. But--"

"Yes; I know," he said gently, as she paused, looking at him steadily,
but with clouded eyes. He read into that "but" a world of opportunities;
a theater of her own--the backing of a powerful newspaper--wealth--and
all, if she so willed it, without interruption to her professional
career.

"Would you think any the less of me?" she asked wistfully.

"Would you think any the less of yourself?" he countered.

The blossoming spray broke under her hand. "Ah, yes; that's the question
after all, isn't it?" she murmured.

Meantime, Gardner, the eternal journalist, fostering a plan of his own,
was gathering material from Guy Mallory who had come in late.

"What gets me," he said, looking over at the host, "is how he can do a
day's