it."
Aggie, having adjusted her cap, was looking at it in the mirror. "But
dear Tish thinks of everything. She had taken off the license plates."

Bettina had gone really pale. She seemed at a loss, and impatient at
herself for being so. "You--you won't have tea?" she asked.

"No, thank you."

"Would you--perhaps you would prefer whiskey and soda."

Aggie turned on her a reproachful eye. "My dear girl," she said, "with
the exception of a little home-made wine used medicinally we drink
nothing. I am the secretary of the Woman's Prohibition Party."

Bettina left us shortly after that to arrange for putting up Letitia
and Aggie. She gave them her mother's room, and whatever impulse she
may have had to put the Presbyterian Psalter by the bed, she restrained
it. By midnight Drummond's "Natural Law" had disappeared from my table
and a novel had taken its place. But Bettina had not lost her air of
bewilderment.

That first evening was very quiet. A young man in white flannels called,
and he and Letitia spent a delightful evening on the porch talking
spark-plugs and carbureters. Bettina sat in a corner and looked at the
moon. Spoken to, she replied in monosyllables in a carefully sweet tone.
The young man's name was Jasper McCutcheon.

It developed that Jasper owned an old racing-car which he kept in the
Bailey garage, and he and Tish went out to look it over. They very
politely asked us all to go along, but Bettina refusing, Aggie and I sat
with her and looked at the moon.

Aggie in her capacity as chaperon, or as one of an association of
chaperons, used the opportunity to examine Bettina on the subject of
Jasper.

"He seems a nice boy," she remarked. Aggie's idea of a nice boy is one
who in summer wears fresh flannels outside, in winter less conspicuously.
"Does he live near?"

"Next door," sweetly but coolly.

"He is very good-looking."

"Ears spoil him--too large."

"Does he come around--er--often?"

"Only two or three times a day. On Sunday, of course, we see more of
him."

Aggie looked at me in the moonlight. Clearly the young man from the next
door needed watching. It was well we had come.

"I suppose you like the same things?" she suggested. "Similar tastes
and--er--all that?"

Bettina stretched her arms over her head and yawned.

"Not so you could notice it," she said coolly. "I can't thick of
anything we agree on. He is an Episcopalian; I'm a Presbyterian. He
approves of suffrage for women; I