"Well, Dicky!" she said. "Who'd have thought it!"

"You said you didn't know her!" his wife said from behind him.

"Who'd have thought wha--what?" he asked with bravado.

"All this!" Miss Julia waved her hand around the room, with its bare
walls, and blankets over the windows to keep the light in and the cold
out, and the circle of us sitting around on sand boxes from the links
and lawn rollers. "To find you here, all snug in your own home, with
your household gods and a wife." Nobody could think of anything to say.
"That is," she went on, "I believe there is a wife. Good heavens, Dicky,
it isn't Minnie?"

He stepped aside at that, disclosing Mrs. Dick on her box, with her
childish eyes wide open.

"There--there IS a wife, Julia," he said. "This is her--she."

Well, she'd come out to make mischief--it was written all over her when
she came in the door, but when Mr. Dick presented his wife, frightened
as he was and still proud of her, and Mrs. Dick smiled in her pretty
way, Miss Summers just walked across and looked down at her with a queer
look on her face. I shut my eyes and waited for the crash, but nothing
came, and when I opened them again there were the two women holding
hands and Miss Summers smiling a sort of crooked grin at Mr. Dick.

"I ought to be very angry with your husband," she said. "I--well, I
never expected him to marry without my being among those present. But
since he has done it--! Dick, you wretched boy, you took advantage of my
being laid up with the mumps!"

"Mumps!" Mrs. Dick said. "Why, he has just had them himself!" She looked
around the circle suspiciously, and every one of us looked as guilty as
if he had been caught with the mumps concealed around him somewhere.

"I didn't have real mumps," Mr. Dick explained. "It was only--er--a
swelling."

"You SAID it was mumps, and even now you hate pickles!"

Mr. Pierce had edged over to Miss Summers and patted her shoulder.

"Be a good sport, Julia," he whispered.

She threw off his hand.

"I'm being an idiot!" she said angrily. "Dick's an ass, and he's treated
me like a villain, but look at that baby! It will be twenty years before
she has to worry about her weight."

"I never cared for pickles," Mr. Dick was saying with dignity. "The
doctor said--"

"I think we'd better be going." Miss Patty got up and gathered up her
cloak. But if she meant to break up the party Miss Summers was not
ready.

"If you don't mind," she said, "I'll