tting the battlefield for the eternal balcony,
"do you know that you are lovelier this instant than you were the day I
married you?"

Mrs. Lorimer knew it quite well. It was due somewhat to good management
as well as luck, and she liked having the results appreciated. She let
him kiss her, carefully, because she had her hat on.

The elder James King did not seem to age with the years. "He is,"
Stephen Lorimer said facetiously, "only too well preserved!" His manner
and mode of life remained the same, save that he lost more heavily at
cards. For the first time in its history the old King place was
mortgaged. In a day when every one who was any one, as Honor's mother
put it, was getting a motor car, the Kings had none. Jimsy, of course,
rode regally in every one else's. The Lorimers had two, an electric in
which Honor's mother glided softly with her little whirring bell from
clubs to luncheons and from luncheons to teas, and a rough and ready
seven-passenger affair into which the whole tribe might be piled, and
which Honor Carmody drove better than her stepfather, who was apt to
dream at the wheel. On Sundays Stephen Lorimer took them all, Jimsy,
Honor, Billy and Ted Carmody, the Lorimer twins and the last little
Lorimer, on motor picnics to the beach. They drove to Santa Monica, down
the Palisades, up the narrow, winding, wave-washed road to the Malibou
Ranch and built a fire and broiled chops and made coffee and baked
potatoes, after their swim, ate like refugees and slept like puppies on
the sand. In the afternoon, when they came back to the gracious old
house in its wide garden on South Figueroa Street Mildred Lorimer would
be waiting, in a frock he loved, to give her husband his tea, cool,
lovely, remote from the rougher fun of life.

In the evenings--Sunday evenings--Honor held her joyous At Homes. Three
or four favored girls and a dozen boys came to supper, a loud, hilarious
meal. Takasugi, the cook, and Kada, the second boy, were given their
freedom. Honor, in the quaint aprons her stepfather had picked up here
and there over the world, pink, capable, with the assistance of Jimsy
and her biggest brothers, got supper.

It was a lively feast. Jimsy King, in one of Kada's white jackets,
waited on the table. They ate enormously, and when they had finished
they pronounced their ungodly grace--a thunderous tattoo on the table
edge, begun with palms and finished with elbows--

None-but-the-righteous-shall-be-S