you? Action's a bit stiff. I say," he stopped Landry in the doorway,
"has Thea ever been down here?"

Landry turned back. "Yes. She came several times when I had erysipelas.
I was a nice mess, with two nurses. She brought down some inside
window-boxes, planted with crocuses and things. Very cheering, only I
couldn't see them or her."

"Didn't she like your place?"

"She thought she did, but I fancy it was a good deal cluttered up for
her taste. I could hear her pacing about like something in a cage. She
pushed the piano back against the wall and the chairs into corners, and
she broke my amber elephant." Landry took a yellow object some four
inches high from one of his low bookcases. "You can see where his leg is
glued on,--a souvenir. Yes, he's lemon amber, very fine."

Landry disappeared behind the curtains and in a moment Fred heard the
wheeze of an atomizer. He put the amber elephant on the piano beside him
and seemed to get a great deal of amusement out of the beast.

IX

WHEN Archie and Ottenburg dined with Thea on Saturday evening, they were
served downstairs in the hotel dining-room, but they were to have their
coffee in her own apartment. As they were going up in the elevator after
dinner, Fred turned suddenly to Thea. "And why, please, did you break
Landry's amber elephant?"

She looked guilty and began to laugh. "Hasn't he got over that yet? I
didn't really mean to break it. I was perhaps careless. His things are
so over-petted that I was tempted to be careless with a lot of them."

"How can you be so heartless, when they're all he has in the world?"

"He has me. I'm a great deal of diversion for him; all he needs. There,"
she said as she opened the door into her own hall, "I shouldn't have
said that before the elevator boy."

"Even an elevator boy couldn't make a scandal about Oliver. He's such a
catnip man."

Dr. Archie laughed, but Thea, who seemed suddenly to have thought of
something annoying, repeated blankly, "Catnip man?"

"Yes, he lives on catnip, and rum tea. But he's not the only one. You
are like an eccentric old woman I know in Boston, who goes about in the
spring feeding catnip to street cats. You dispense it to a lot of
fellows. Your pull seems to be more with men than with women, you know;
with seasoned men, about my age, or older. Even on Friday afternoon I
kept running into them, old boys I hadn't seen for years, thin at the
part and thick at the girth, until I stood still