on them, spilled
things on the--? ugh!"

"But the colors, Natalie dear! The old faded 'copper-tones, the
dull-blues, the dead-rose! There is a beauty about age, you know. Lovely
as you are, you'll be even lovelier as an old woman."

"I'm getting there rather rapidly."

He turned and looked at her critically. No slightest aid that she had
given her beauty missed his eyes, the delicate artificial lights in her
hair, her eyebrows drawn to a hair's breadth and carefully arched, the
touch of rouge under her eyes and on the lobes of her ears. But she was
beautiful, no matter what art had augmented her real prettiness. She was
a charming, finished product, from her veil and hat to her narrowly
shod feet. He liked finished things, well done. He liked the glaze on a
porcelain; he liked the perfect lacquering on the Chinese screen he had
persuaded Natalie to buy; he preferred wood carved into the fine lines
of Sheraton to the trees that grow in the Park, for instance, through
which they were driving.

A Sheraton sideboard was art. Even certain forms of Colonial mahogany
were art, although he was not fond of them. And Natalie was--art. Even
if she represented the creative instincts of her dressmaker and her
milliner, and not her own--he did not like a Louis XV sofa the less that
it had not carved itself.

Possibly Natalie appealed then to his collective instinct, he had not
analyzed it. He only knew that he liked being with her, and he was not
annoyed, certainly, by the fact that he knew their constant proximity
was arousing a certain amount of comment.

So:

"You are very beautiful," he said with his appraising glance full on
her. "You are quite the loveliest woman I know."

"Still? With a grown son?"

"I am not a boy myself, you know."

"What has that to do with it?"

He hesitated, then laughed a little.

"I don't know," he said. "I didn't mean to say that, exactly. Of course,
that fact is that I'm rather glad you are not a debutante. You would be
giving me odds and ends of dances if you were, you know, and shifting me
as fast as possible. As it is--"

The coquetry which is a shallow woman's substitute for passion stirred
in her.

"Well? I'm awfully interested."

He turned and faced her.

"I wonder if you are!"

"Go on, Roddie. As it is??"

"As it is," he said, rather rapidly, "you give me a great deal of
happiness. I can't say all I would like to, but just being with
you--Natalie, I wonder if you know