d.
It was a case in which supreme selfishness exerted the effect of
personality.

Leaving the letter where he had placed it, Gerty sat sipping her coffee
while she looked up at him with the candid cynicism which lent a piquant
charm to the almost doll-like regularity of her features.

"You did not get three hours sleep and yet you're so fresh you smell of
soap," she observed as an indignant protest, "while I've had six and I'm
still too tired to move."

"Oh, I'm all right--I never let myself get seedy," returned Perry, with
his loud though pleasant laugh. "That's the mistake all you women
make."

Half closing her eyes Gerty leaned back and surveyed him with a curious
detachment--almost as if he were an important piece of architecture
which she had been recommended to admire and to which she was patiently
trying in vain to adjust her baffled vision. The smaller she screwed her
gaze the more remotely magnificent loomed his proportions.

"How you manage it is more than I can understand," she said.

Perry stared for a moment in an amiable vacancy at the coffee pot. Then
she watched the animation move feebly in his face, while he pulled at
his short fair moustache with a characteristic masculine gesture.
Physically, she admitted, he had never appeared to a better advantage in
her eyes.

"By the way, I had a game of billiards with Kemper and we talked pretty
late," he said, as if evolving the explanation for which she had not
asked. "He got back from Europe yesterday you know."

"He did?" Her indifferent gaiety played like harmless lightning around
his massive bulk. "Then we may presume, I suppose, on Madame Alta for
the opera season?"

He met the question with an admiring chuckle. "Do you really mean you
think he's been abroad with her all this time?"

"Well, what else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the
utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most
effective pose.

Perry's chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar. "Good Lord, how women
talk!" he burst out. "Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he
never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago.
There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a
celebrity--most men do. But, my dear girl," he concluded in a kind of
awful reverence, "what a tongue you've got. It's a jolly good thing for
me that I'm your husband or you wouldn't leave me a blessed patch of
reputation to my back."

His humo