summer, and could be generous without any glimmering of a sense of
justice. She was close to fifty.

"How do, Mrs. Bannister," she said heartily. "I've heard Adele mention
your name. How do you think she looks? I think she looks like death.
How do, dear?" she added to Teddy. "Are you mama's boy? I don't live in
New York like you do; I live in Browning, Indiana. Don't you think
that's a funny place to live? But it's a real pretty place just the
same."

"Have you had your lunch?" Adele was asking. "We haven't. I was kept by
the girl at the milliner's--"

It was one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Martie was free to lunch
where she pleased. She was free even to sit down with a woman whose
name was under a cloud. They all crowded into an express elevator, and
sat down at a table in the restaurant on the twelfth floor.

Presently the unreality of it faded from Martie's uppermost
consciousness and she began to enjoy herself. To sit with the wife of a
Mystic Shriner, and the woman who had done what Adele had done, and
whose husband incidentally was deeply devoted to herself, was not
according to Monroe. But she was in New York!

"I guess I was a silly girl, misled by a man of the world," Adele was
saying in her old, complaining, complacent voice. "I know I was a fool,
Martie, but don't men do that sort of thing all the time, and get over
it? Why should us women pay all the time? You know as well as I do that
John Dryden was just as queer as Dick's hatband; I was hungering, as a
girl will, for pleasure and excitement--"

"It was a dirty crime, the way that doctor acted," Mrs. Baker
contributed, her tone much pleasanter than her words. "He must have
been a skunk, if you ask me. Adele here was wrong, Mrs. Bannister; you
and I won't quarrel about that. But Adele wasn't nothing but a child at
heart--"

"I believed anything he told me!" Adele drawled, playing with her knife
and fork, her lashes dropped.

"Dryden," the loyal sister continued majestically, "threw her over the
second he got a chance; that's what she got for putting up with HIM for
all those years! And then, if you please, this other feller discovers
that he can't get rid of his wife. I came on then," she said warmly as
Martie murmured her sympathy, "and I says to Adele, throw the whole
crowd of them down. Billy Baker and I have plenty, and my
daughter--Ruby, she's a lovely girl and she's married an elegant feller
whose people own about all the lumber intere