up of
dear friends and he'll bring up another--to be introduced; and--there
we'll be!"

"Oh, not so bad as that, Julie!"

"Oh, yes, indeed, Ann!" pursued Miss Ives with morose enjoyment. "You
don't know how helpless one is. I'll be annoyed to death for the rest
of the month, just so that the Dancing Girl can go back to the city
this winter and say, 'Oh, girls, Julia Ives was staying where mamma and
I were this summer, and she's just a DEAR! She doesn't make up one bit
off the stage, and she dresses just as PLAIN! I saw her every day and
got some dandy snapshots. She's just a darling when you know her.'"

"Well! What an unspoiled modest little soul you are, Julie!"
interrupted the doctor's admiring voice. He wheeled away the umbrella
and, lying luxuriously on his elbows in the sun, beamed at them both
through his glasses.

"Jim," said the actress, severely, "it's positively indecent--the habit
you're getting of evesdropping on Ann and me!"

"It gives me sidelights on your characters," said the doctor, quite
brazenly.

"Ann--don't you call that disgraceful?"

"I certainly do, Ju," his wife agreed warmly. "But Jim has no sense of
honor." Ann Arbuthnot, in the fifteen years of her married life, had
never been able to keep a thrill of adoration out of her voice when she
spoke, however jestingly, of her husband. It trembled there now.

"Well, what's wrong, Julie? Some old admirer turn up?" asked the
doctor, sleepily content to follow any conversational lead, in the idle
pleasantness of the hour.

"No--no!" she corrected him, "just some silly social complications
ahead--which I hate!"

"Be rude," suggested the doctor, pleasantly.

"Now, you know, I'd love that!" said Mrs. Arbuthnot, youthfully. "I'd
simply love to be followed and envied and adored!"

"No, you wouldn't, Ann!" Miss Ives assured her promptly. "You'd like
it, as I did, for a little while. And then the utter USELESSNESS of it
would strike you. Especially from such little complacent, fluffy
whirlings as that Dancing Girl!"

"Yes, and that's the kind of a girl I like," persisted the other,
smiling.

"That's the kind of a girl you WERE, Ann, I've no doubt," said the
actress, vivaciously, "only sweeter. I know she wore white ruffles and
a velvet band on her hair, didn't she, Jim? And roses in her belt?"

"She did," said the doctor, reminiscently. "I believe she flirted in
her kindergarten days. She was always engaged to ride or dance or row
on the