d at the grotesque contrast between Marietta's injured conception
of the brilliant social event from which she had been excluded and the
leaden fiasco which it had really been, that even at the time, in the
midst of denying hotly her sister's charges of snobbishness and social
ambition, she was unable to keep back a shaky laugh or two as she cried
out: "Oh, Etta! If you could know how things went, you'd be too thankful
to have escaped it. It was awful beyond words!"

Marietta answered her by handing her with a grim silence a copy of that
morning's paper, open at _Society Notes_. Loyal Flora Burgess had
lavished on "Miss Lydia's" first dinner party her entire vocabulary of
deferential, not to say reverential, encomiums. The "function had
inaugurated a new era of cosmopolitan amplitude of social life in
Endbury," was the ending of the lengthy paragraph that described the
table decorations, the menu, the costume of the hostess, the names of
the music-makers afterward.

Lydia burst into a hysterical laugh. "Flora Burgess is too killing!" she
cried. "She was here in the afternoon to get details, and I just let her
wander around and see what she could make out. I was too busy to pay any
attention to her--Oh, Etta! I was dead and buried with fatigue before
the people even began to come. I can't even remember much about it
except that every single thing was wrong. That about 'cosmopolitan
amplitude--' Oh, isn't Flora too funny!--means having music after
dinner, I suppose. I don't know what else."

"Of course," said Marietta, rising to go, "it doesn't make any
difference what it was really like! Only the people that were there know
that. The report in the paper--"

"Oh, Marietta, what a thing to say--that it's all pretense, every
bit--and not--"

Marietta went on steadily and mordantly: "I don't know how you feel
about it, but _I_ shouldn't be very easy in my mind to have my only
sister's name not on the list of guests at my most exclusive social
function."

Dr. Melton, who made Lydia a professional call that morning, found her
with reddened eyes, slowly washing and putting away innumerable dirty
dishes. She told him that the second girl, apparently overcome by the
events of the day before, had disappeared during the night. Dr. Melton
thrust out his lips and said nothing, but he took off his coat, put on
an apron, and, pushing his patient away from the dishpan, attacked a
huge pile of sticky plates. He worked rapidly and