s, and very expressive.

"Oh, you'd _like_ a man to write and say that he couldn't come to dinner
because it was his mother's birthday, and he always dined with her on
that occasion, and besides he was in deep mourning, and had influenza,
and was going to the first night at the St. James's, and was expecting
some old friends up from the country to stay with him, and would be out
of town shooting at the time?"

"Certainly; so much inventive ingenuity is most flattering. Don't you
think it's better than to say on the telephone that he wouldn't be able
to come that evening as he wouldn't be able to; and then ring off?" said
Bertha.

"Rupert would never do that! He's intensely polite; politeness is
ingrained in his nature. I'm rather hopeless about it all; and yet when
I think how sometimes when I speak to him and he doesn't answer but
gives that slight smile ..."

"How well I know that slight, superior smile--discouraging yet spurring
you on to further efforts! ... Rupert--Rupert! What a name! How can
people be called Rupert? It isn't done, you're not living in a
_feuilleton_, you must change the man's name, dear."

"Indeed I sha'n't! Nonsense; it's a beautiful name! Rupert Denison! It
suits him; it suits me. Bertha, you can't deny it's a handsome, noble
face, like a Vandyke portrait of Charles I, or one of those people in
the National Gallery. And he must take a certain amount of interest in
me, because he wants me to learn more, to be more cultured. He's so
accomplished! He knows simply everything. The other day he sent me a
book about the early Italian masters."

"Did he, though? How jolly!"

"A little volume of Browning, too--that tiny edition, beautifully
bound."

Bertha made an inarticulate sound.

"And you know he found out my birthday, and sent me a few dark red roses
and Ruskin's Stones of Venice."

"Nothing like being up to date," said Bertha. "Right up to the day after
to-morrow! Rupert always is. How did he find out your birthday?"

"How do you suppose?"

"I can't think. By looking in _Who's Who?_--going to Somerset House or
the British Museum?"

"How unkind you are! Of course not. No--I told him."

"Ah, I thought perhaps it was some ingenious plan like that. I should
think that's the way he usually finds out things--by being told."

"Bertha, why do you sneer at him?"

"Did I?--I didn't mean to. Why does he behave like a belated
schoolmaster?"

"Behave like a--oh, Bertha!"

Madeline was