s Vivi,
shaking her head. "Just for a few days. I think you'd give a girl the
grandest sort of a rush, but as for believing a word you said--never!"

"What do you mean?" said Skippy, immensely puffed up.

"It shows in your eyes," said Vivi with a look of having at last
deciphered the mystery. "Besides, girls have spoiled you. You have had
things too easily. No wonder you're conceited."

Miss Cantillon was discoursing brilliantly on a crow that had been
struck by lightning in Oklahoma and had fallen into a wheat field and
set fire to the grain, which had precipitated a conflagration which had
necessitated calling out the fire departments of two counties.

"You're offended now," said Vivi in a contrite whisper.

"Some one's given you an awfully bad opinion of me," said Skippy
stiffly, frowning to show the displeasure he did not feel.

"Well it's true, isn't it?"

"It is not!"

"How about Jennie Tupper?"

"Oh that!" said Skippy burying the memory with a wave of his hand.

"You see you _are_ a brute! Well I don't mind. I like your hands."

Skippy took a precautionary glance at the ends of his baseball fingers
and then allowed them to come to rest on the tablecloth.

"Now you're trying to jolly me," he said astutely.

"No. I always notice hands the first thing. They tell so much about your
character. I saw yours at once."

"You can read hands?" said Skippy, who knew this much of the etiquette
of the game.

"Yes, but not now," said Vivi in a promissory tone.

Skippy's attitude towards social functions underwent a change of front.
He began to feel confidently, vaingloriously at ease. He joined in the
general conversation determined to rout the brilliant Miss Cantillon,
who knew so many things. Now the rule for such preeminence is simple and
some acquire it by cunning and others by instinct. Deny the obvious.
Reputations have fattened on nothing else. When inevitably the moment
arrived to discuss Maude Adams, and her latest play, Skippy announced
that he did not like Maude Adams.

"Not like Maude Adams!"

There was a sudden silence and all eyes were turned expectantly toward
him as to a manifestly superior intelligence. Finally the swinger of
dumb-bells voiced the question.

"But why?"

Skippy considered.

"Too much like Maude Adams," he said cryptically.

Vivi looked at him in admiration.

"How clever, I never thought of that."

"Well, I'm just frantic about Maude Adams!" said the athletic Miss