ck. I shall be
so wise very soon that you'll be afraid of me."

"Heaven forbid, you dear little inspirer of awe."

"At any rate, she's taken the greatest fancy to me, and I to her. She
came here yesterday in the pouring rain, and we spent a long afternoon
talking together. We feel the same way about everything. She says that
with my beauty, I ought to make a great hit, and she's going to give a
big reception in my honor. Of course, with her experience, she can be a
great help to me."

"I see." Dick forgot his breakfast entirely, and meditated.

"What is Mr. Appleton like?" Lena persisted.

"He has enough money to make me pale my ineffectual fires, and he adds
to that the personality of the great American desert. But I suspect his
wife is so wholly satisfied with the golden glow that the latter fact
has never penetrated to her consciousness. I think Mrs. Appleton has not
yet recovered from her astonishment at finding herself wedded to
profusion. It appears to delight her afresh from day to day."

"You can be very nasty about people when you choose." Lena's tone was
unmistakably vexed.

"Frankly, Lena, I do not like Mrs. Appleton or her attitude toward life.
She is the kind of woman who refuses to take the simplest thing simply,
the kind that thinks subscription dances and clubs and private cars and
family tombs were invented chiefly to show our exclusiveness."

"Well, what are they for?"

Dick laughed. "Most of them to get all the fun there is in things, I
should say; and the tombs, to show that love holds even after death."

"I like her, anyway," said Lena. "I like her better than the stuck-up
kind of women." The words sound bald. Lena's lips made them seem
humorous. It was so easy to avoid disapprobation just by that little
smile and whimsical twist of the mouth.

"And whom do you mean by that!"

"You know whom I mean," Lena answered defiantly. "And I consider Mrs.
Appleton a great deal more of a society woman than Mrs. Lenox. At any
rate she goes a great deal more. And she does not neglect her church
duties or her charities, either. She has told me things that she is
doing."

"I should say she does not neglect them," ejaculated Dick. "She has the
art so to regild them that even philanthropy and religion become mere
appendages to society. Does Mrs. Lenox belong to Ram Juna's class,
Lena?"

"No. Mrs. Appleton asked her, but she wrote that though she was
interested in oriental thought, she, personally,