est she did not enjoy
having economy preached to her. She looked a little sullen for a
moment and bored.

"What's the matter with my giving a dance?" I asked.

"Oh, will you?" cried Lucy, the sullen look vanishing beneath a radiant
flash of child-like joy and enthusiasm. "Where will you give it? At
Wilcox's?"

"Anywhere you say."

Fulton tossed his hands in a merry gesture of despair.

"Now _you're_ stung!" he said, and then to Lucy, with a swift change of
voice and manner: "I was only joking, you know that. If you want to
give a dance, give it."

It was as if a child had cried to be taken up, and in the face of all
the tenets of modern training, had been taken up. And you knew that
with the lightest heart in the world Mrs. Fulton was going to spend
money, which her husband could ill afford.

Shortly after dinner a loud yelling arose in the nursery, and the
Fultons hurried off to investigate and give comfort, leaving the
manipulation of a fearful and wonderful glass coffee machine to Evelyn
Gray and me.

"Lucy," said Evelyn, "has as much idea of money as an alcohol lamp has.
She ought to be well shaken. I don't believe John has been able to lay
by a cent for a rainy day."

"But think what a run she gives him for his money. He's the original
happy married man. Think how she works to make him comfortable, and
how she mothers the babies, and how she hangs on his words, as if
nobody else was present. Just now, most people would have sent a
servant to find out which baby was making a disturbance, and why--but
those two simply bolted for the nursery as if controlled by one brain
and one set of muscles."

"Almost makes a bachelor wish he wasn't a bachelor!"

"Just the same I think they are a model of what married people ought to
be. Since I got to know them pretty well, I've entirely changed my
notions of the institution."

"I always thought it was a bully good institution,"' said Evelyn.
Through two glass tubes water, raised almost to the boiling point by an
alcohol flame, began to mount from one retort into another containing
pulverized coffee.

"But," she went on with an affectation of melancholy, "I've never found
the right man, or he's never found me."

"Have you looked," I asked, "diligently and with patience?"

She lifted her fine sea-blue eyes to mine. "Not so diligently, I hope,
as to be conspicuous," she said. "But no girl fails to examine the
possibility of every man she meets--marri