something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared
and left me.

That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of
circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.

During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got
up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me
why I couldn't cook--when not one of them knew one side of a
range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she
did--saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she
believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming--for Anne
to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The
Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it
along.



Chapter II. THE WAY IT BEGAN

It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that
dinner a success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the
Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had given me for
Christmas. Their chauffeur had been gone for hours with their
machine, and they had telephoned all the police stations without
success. They were afraid that there had been an awful smash;
they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie said, but it
takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.

Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from