hospitals, but Warren had added to this the information that
George was a poor business man, and ill qualified to protect his
own interests.

Yet, in his own home--a handsome and yet shabby brownstone house
in the West Fifties--he appeared to better advantage. There was a
brightness in his plain face when he looked at his wife, and an
adoring response in her glance that after twelve years of married
life seemed admirable to Rachael. "Alice" was a word continually
on his lips; what Alice said and thought and did was evidently
perfection. Before the Gregorys had been ten minutes in the house
on their first visit he had gone downstairs to inspect the
furnace, wound and set a stopped clock, answered the telephone
twice, and fondly carried upstairs a refractory four-year-old
girl, who came boldly down in her nightgown, with reproaches and
requests. On his return from this trip he brought down the one-
year-old baby, another girl, delicious in the placid hour between
supper and bed, and he and his wife and Warren Gregory exchanged
admiring glances as the beautiful Mrs. Gregory took the child
delightedly in her arms, contrasting her own dark and glowing
loveliness with the tiny Katharine's gold and roses.

It was a quiet evening, but Rachael liked it. She liked their
simple, affectionate talk, their reminiscences, the serenity of
the large, plainly furnished rooms, the glowing of coal fires in
the old-fashioned steel-barred grates. She liked Alice Valentine's
placidity, the sureness of herself that marked this woman as more
highly civilized than so many of the other women Rachael knew.
There was none of Judy's and Gertrude's and Vera's excitability
and restlessness here. Alice was concerned neither with her own