n River.

The youngest guest was eating mushrooms _sous cloche_ in contented
silence at the Colonel's left. The scene was not new to her. She could
not remember her first party here; she was probably the only person in
Green River who could pass over that momentous occasion so lightly. She
had grown up as the only child in the inner circle. She had been
privileged to excuse herself, when the formal succession of courses at
some holiday function was too much for her, and read fairy tales on a
cushion by the library fire, out of the fat, purple edition de luxe of
the "Arabian Nights" that was always waiting for her there. Though her
white ruffled skirts had grown long now, and her silvery gold braids
were pinned up, and she was allowed to fill an empty place at the
Colonel's table whenever he asked her, if not quite on his regular
dinner list yet, Judith was not much changed from that wide-eyed child,
and to-night her eyes looked sleepy and soft, as if she had serious
thoughts of the cushion by the fire and the fairy book still.

The scene was not new, but it kept a fascination for her, like a
transformation scene in a pantomime. Mr. J. Cleveland Kent, the manager
of the shoe factory, who had taken her in to dinner, had been leaning
out of a factory window in his shirt-sleeves, his black hair tumbled,
and badly in need of a shave, when she passed on her way home from
school. He looked mysterious and interesting in a dinner coat, like her
idea of an Italian nobleman.

When Judith knocked at the kitchen door to deliver a note, Mrs. Theodore
Burr, in a pink cooking apron, corsetless, and with her beautiful yellow
hair in patent curlers, had been blackening the kitchen stove, and
quarrelling with the furnace man about an overcharge of fifty cents on
his monthly bill. The Burrs had no maid. Theodore Burr had been
assisting Judge Saxon ever since he passed his bar examinations, but he
was not admitted to partnership yet. This was beginning to make gossip,
for he worked hard. He had broken his dinner engagement to-night, as he
often did, to stay at home and work. Randolph Sebastian, the secretary,
with the queer, hybrid foreign name, and thin face and ingratiating
brown eyes, had his place at the table.

Mrs. Burr, stately and slender now in jetted black, the lowest cut gown
in the room, her yellow hair fluffing and flaring into an unbelievable
number of well-filled-out puffs, was chattering to the Colonel in a low
voice, so