will drown her war talk. Good-by." She nodded here and there and
left, to be driven home with her adipose chow in a Rolls-Royce.

Christine Hurley touched a photograph that stood on Joan's desk.
"Who's this good-looking person?" she asked.

"My husband," said Joan.

"Oh, really! When are we to see something of him?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Joan. "He's about somewhere."

Miss Hurley laughed. "It's like that already, is it? Haven't you
only just been married?"

"Yes," said Joan lightly, "but we've begun where most people leave
off. It's a great saving of time and temper!"

The sophisticated Christine, no longer in the first flush of giddy
youth, still unmarried after four enterprising years, was surprised
into looking with very real interest at the girl who had been until
that moment merely a hostess. Her extreme finish, her unself-
conscious confidence and intrepidity, her unassumed lightness of
temper were not often found in one so young and apparently virginal.
She dismissed as unbelievable the story that this girl had been
brought up in the country in an atmosphere of early Victorianism.
She had obviously just come from one of those elaborate finishing
schools in which the daughters of rich people are turned into
hothouse plants by sycophants and parasites and sent out into the
world the most perfect specimens of superautocracy, to patronize