e thin straight line of the mouth. "If you think for one
minute----"

"Oh, now, dear. You know what I mean, sweetheart. Why, say, I never
could see any girl until I met you. You know that."

He was as honestly in love with her as he had been nine years before.
Perhaps he did not feel now, as then, that she had conferred a favour
upon him in marrying him. Or if he did he must have known that he had
made fair return for such favour.

Cora had a Hudson seal coat now, with a great kolinsky collar. Her vivid
face bloomed rosily in this soft frame. Cora was getting a little
heavier. Not stout, but heavier, somehow. She tried, futilely, to
reduce. She would starve herself at home for days, only to gain back the
vanished pounds at one afternoon's orgy of whipped-cream salad, and
coffee, and sweets at the apartment of some girl in the Crowd. Dancing
had come in and the Crowd had taken it up vociferously. Raymond was not
very good at it. He had not filled out with the years. He still was lean
and tall and awkward. The girls in the crowd tried to avoid dancing with
him. That often left Cora partnerless unless she wanted to dance again
and again with Raymond.

"How can you expect the boys to ask me to dance when you don't dance
with their wives! Good heavens, if they can learn, you can. And for
pity's sake _don't count_! You're so _fun_-ny!"

He tried painstakingly to heed her advice, but his long legs made a
sorry business of it. He heard one of the girls refer to him as "that
giraffe." He had put his foot through an absurd wisp of tulle that she
insisted on calling a train.

They were spending a good deal of money now, but Ray jousted the
landlord, the victualler, the furrier, the milliner, the hosiery maker,
valiantly and still came off the victor. He did not have as much time as
he would have liked to work on the new invention. The invisible rim. It
was calculated so to blend with the glass of the lens as to be, in
appearance, one with it, while it still protected the eyeglass from
breakage. "Fortune in it, girlie," he would say, happily, to Cora.
"Million dollars, that's all."

He had been working on the invisible rim for five years. Familiarity
with it had bred contempt in Cora. Once, in a temper, "Invisible is
right," she had said, slangily.

They had occupied the four-room apartment for five years. Cora declared
it was getting beyond her. "You can't get any decent help. The washwoman
acts as if she was doing me a