you going?"

He laughed. "Mrs. Berkeley called me up this morning and asked me if I
would take somebody's place. She didn't say whose place it was, but she
did divulge the fact that the dinner is given to Vetch. I told her I'd
come--that I was so used to taking other people's places I could fill
six at the same time. But a dinner to Vetch! I wonder why she is doing
it?"

"That's easy. Mr. Berkeley wants something from the Governor. I don't
know what he wants, but I do know that whatever it is he wants it very
badly."

"And he thinks he'll get it by asking him to dinner? There seems to me
an obvious flaw in Berkeley's reasoning. I doubt if Vetch is the kind of
man who follows when you hold out an apple. He appears to be exactly the
opposite, and I think he's more likely to dash off than to come when he
is called. I wonder, by the way, if they are going to have Mrs.
Stribling?"

"Rose Stribling?" A gleam of anger shone in Corinna's eyes. "Why should
that interest you?"

"Oh, they say--at least Mrs. Berkeley says, and if there is any
misinformation abroad she ought to be aware of it--that Mrs. Stribling's
latest attachment to her train is the Governor himself."

He had expected his gossip to arouse Corinna, and in this he was not
mistaken. Springing up from her relaxed position, she sat straight and
unbending, with her indignant eyes on his face. "Why, I thought the war
had cured her."

"The war was not a cure; it was merely a temporary drug for our vanity,"
he rejoined gaily. "It didn't cure me, so you could hardly regard it as
a remedy for Mrs. Stribling's complaint. I imagine coquetry is a more
obstinate malady even than priggishness, and, Heaven knows, I tried hard
enough to get rid of that."

"I hoped you would," admitted Corinna. "But, dear boy, the way to make
you human--and you've never been really human all through, you know--was
not with a uniform and glory." She was talking flippantly, for they
made a pretence now of alluding lightly to his years in France--he had
gone into the war before his country--and to the nervous malady, the
disabled will, he had brought back. "What you need is not to win more
esteem, but to lose some that you've got. Your salvation lies in the
opposite direction from where flags are waving. If you could only
deliberately arrange to do something that would lower your reputation in
the eyes of gouty old gentlemen or mothers with marriageable daughters!
If you could manage to ge