"Well, in private life she's Mrs. Harry Underwood--that's Harry with
her--but she's better known all over the country as the cleverest
producer of illustrated jingles for advertising we have. Remember that
Simple Simon parody for the mincemeat advertisement we laughed over
some time ago, and I told you I knew the woman who did it? There she
is before you," and Dicky waved his hand grandiloquently.

"Lillian Gale!" I almost gasped the name.

"The same," rejoined Dicky, and turned again to his program, while I
sat in amazed horror, with all my oldtime theories crumbling around
me.

For I had read of Lillian Gale and her married troubles. I knew that
Harry Underwood was her second husband and that she had been divorced
from her first spouse after a scandal which has been aired quite fully
in the newspapers. She had not been proved guilty, but her skirts
certainly had been smirched by rumor. According to the ideas which had
been mine, Dicky should have shrunk from having me ever meet such a
woman, let alone planning to have me on terms of intimacy with her.

What should I do?

When the curtain went down on the first act I turned to Dicky happily,
eager to hear his comments and filled with a throng of thoughts to
wipe away any remembrance from his mind of the unhappiness that had
promised to mar my evening, and which I feared he had read in my
eyes. But just as I opened my lips to speak, he interrupted me with a
startled exclamation: