"it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she
continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach
even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely
resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he
actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.

"But where is it?" he demanded.

"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a moment
devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have the wisdom
of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted complacently,
"that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your young innocent would
have mangled matters to the point of butchery and have gloried like a
martyr in her domestic squabbles, but I've learned a lesson or two from
misfortune, and one of them is that a man invariably prides himself upon
possessing the quality he hasn't got. That's a perfectly safe rule," she
annotated along the margin of her story. "I used to compliment an artist
upon his art and an Apollo upon his beauty--but it never worked. They
always looked as if I had under-valued them, so now I industriously
praise the folly of the wise and the wisdom of the fool."

"And the decorative talent of Perry," laughed one of the callers.

"You needn't smile," commented Gerty, while Trent watched the little
greenish flame dance in her eyes, "it isn't funny--it's philosophy. I
made it out of life."

"But what about the terra-cotta?" enquired Susie.