comic moment, she added, "but I'll tell
them you say so, if you like."

She was as good as her word--she usually was.

When the party was at tea about the drawing-room fire, she asked without
the slightest change of expression:

"Would any one like to hear Roland's explanation of why he is not with
us?"

"Had it anything to do with his not being asked?" said a pale young man;
and as soon as he had spoken, he glanced hastily round the circle to
ascertain how his remark had succeeded.

So far as Mrs. Almar was concerned it had not succeeded at all, in fact,
though he did not know it, nothing he said would ever succeed with her
again, although a week before she had hung upon his every word. He had
been a new discovery, something unknown and Bohemian, but alas, a day or
two before, she had observed that underlying his socialistic theories was
an aching desire for social recognition. He liked to tell his bejeweled
hostesses about his friends the car-drivers; but, oh, twenty times more,
he would have liked to tell the car-drivers about his friends the
bejeweled hostesses. For this reason Mrs. Almar despised him, and where
she despised she made no secret of the fact.

"Not asked, Mr. Wickham!" she said. "I assume my husband is asked
wherever I am," and then turning to Laura Ussher she added with a faint
smile: "One's husband is always asked, isn't he?"

"Certainly, as long as you never allow him to come," said another
speaker.

This was the other great beauty of the hour--or, since she was blond and
some years younger than Mrs. Almar, perhaps it would be right to say that
she was the beauty of the hour.

She was very tall, golden, fresh, smooth, yet with faint hollows in her
cheeks that kept her freshness from being insipid. Christine Fenimer had
another advantage--she was unmarried. In spite of the truth of the
observation that a married woman's greatest charm is her husband, he is
also in the most practical sense a disadvantage; he does sometimes stand
across the road of advancement, even in a land of easy divorce. Mrs.
Almar, for instance, was regretfully aware that she might have done much
better than Roland Almar. The great stakes were really open to the
unmarried.

She was particularly aware of this fact at the moment, for the party was
understood to be awaiting a great stake. Mrs. Ussher had discovered a
cousin, a young man who, soon after graduating from a technical college,
had invented a process in the