should explain him to Francis in an
audible aside by that name. However, it was unnecessary. Francis
placed him immediately, it was to be seen, and was cold almost to
rudeness. Logan did not notice it much. He sat down with them,
declined the food Marjorie offered, ordered himself three slivers of
dry toast and a cup of lemonless and creamless tea, and sipped them and
nibbled them as if even they were a concession to manners.

What really was the matter with Logan Marjorie was doomed never to
know. Francis told her afterwards, with a certain marital brevity,
that it was a combination of dry toast and thinking too much about
French poets. His literary affiliations, which he earned his living
by, had stopped short at the naughty nineties, when everybody was very
unhealthy and soulful and hinted darkly at tragedies; the period of the
Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Dowson, and the
last end of Wilde. He undoubtedly had the charming and fluent manners
of his time, anachronism though he was. And he talked a great deal,
and very brilliantly, if a bit excitedly. He plunged now, in his
charming, high, slightly too mannered voice, into a discussion with
Marjorie on the absolute rottenness of the modern magazine, considered
from the viewpoint of style. He overwhelmed them with instances of how
all magazines were owned by persons who neither had cultivation nor
desired any. Francis answered him very little, so Marjorie, wifely
before her time, found herself trying nervously to keep up with Logan,
and hurling more thoughts at him about Baudelaire than she had known
she possessed. As a matter of fact she'd never read any of him, but
Logan thought she had to his dying day, which says a good deal for her
brains. Presently Francis summoned the waiter in rather a martial
voice, demanded a taxi of him efficiently, and Marjorie found herself
swept away from Logan and taxi-ing extravagantly uptown before she knew
what she was at.

Francis wasn't cross, it appeared. The first thing he did when he got
her in the cab was to sweep her close to him--the second to burst into
a peal of delighted laughter, and quote

"I had a cow, a gentle cow, who browsed beside my door,
Did not think much of Maeterlinck, and would not, furthermore!"

"Heavens!" he ended, "that fool and his magazine editors! Nobody but
you could have been so patient with the poor devil, Marge."

He leaned her and himself back in th