e took the check and
screwed it into a small gold case. "I'm dining with my bandage-rolling
aunt and going on to the opera. Thank goodness, the music will drown
her war talk. Good-by." She nodded here and there and left, to be
driven home with her adipose chow in a Rolls-Royce.

Christine Hurley touched a photograph that stood on Joan's desk. "Who's
this good-looking person?" she asked.

"My husband," said Joan.

"Oh, really! When are we to see something of him?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Joan. "He's about somewhere."

Miss Hurley laughed. "It's like that already, is it? Haven't you only
just been married?"

"Yes," said Joan lightly, "but we've begun where most people leave off.
It's a great saving of time and temper!"

The sophisticated Christine, no longer in the first flush of giddy
youth, still unmarried after four enterprising years, was surprised
into looking with very real interest at the girl who had been until
that moment merely a hostess. Her extreme finish, her unself-conscious
confidence and intrepidity, her unassumed lightness of temper were not
often found in one so young and apparently virginal. She dismissed as
unbelievable the story that this girl had been brought up in the
country in an atmosphere of early Victorianism. She had obviously just
come from one of those elaborate finishing schools in which the
daughters of rich people are turned into hothouse plants by sycophants
and parasites and sent out into the world the most perfect specimens of
superautocracy, to patronize their parents, scoff at discipline, ignore
duty and demand the sort of luxury that brought Rome to its fall. With
admiration and amusement she watched her say good-by to one woman after
another as the various tables broke up. It really gave her quite a
moment to see the way in which Joan gave as careless and unawed a hand
to Mrs. Alan Hosack and Mrs. Cooper Jekyll as to the Countess Palotta,
who had nothing but pride to rattle in her little bag; and when finally
she too drove away, it was with the uneasy sense of dissatisfaction
that goes with the dramatic critic from a production in which he has
honestly to confess that there is something new--and arresting.

Alice Palgrave stayed behind. She felt a natural proprietary interest
in the success of the afternoon. "My dear," she said emotionally,
"you're perfectly wonderful!"

"I am? Why?"

"To any other just-married girl this would have been an ordeal, a
nerve-wrecking ev