"Well--no. No. Not your card--exactly. Or, yes! Yes, you must, I
suppose."

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening
Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after
supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for
the scissors. Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss
Triscoe joined them, to her father's frowning mystification. He stared
round for a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the
interest Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it
in. He had to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard
the concert through beside Miss Triscoe.

"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?" March
demanded, when his wife and he were alone.

"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she began, in a tone which he
felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.

"Look here, my dear! Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?"

"That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I should
like to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?" She
added, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him."

"Oh, does he!"

"Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we
will chaperon them. And I promised that you would."

"That I would?"

"It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can
see something of Carlsbad society."

"But I'm not going!" he declared. "It would interfere with my cure. The
sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and
I should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts
of unwholesome things."

"Nonsense! The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course."

"You can go yourself," he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before
twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel
circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for
Mrs. March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal
authority in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with
safety and pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it
began to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she
could finally have made March go in her place, but she felt that she
ought really to go in his, and save him from the late hours and the late
supper.