There was a short silence while he finished the operation of
shaving, and Rachael, who was busy with the defective clasp of a
string of pearls, bent absorbedly over the microscopic ring and
swivel.

"Let's think about the dinner," she said presently. She found that
he had already planned almost all the details.

When it took place, about ten days later, she resolutely steeled
herself for an experience that promised to hold no special
enjoyment for her. Her love for her husband made her find in his
enthusiasm for Magsie something a little pitiful and absurd.
Magsie was only a girl, a rather shallow and stupid girl at that,
yet Warren was as excited over the arrangements for the dinner as
if she had been the most important of personages. If it had been
some other dinner--the affair for the English ambassador, or the
great London novelist, or the fascinating Frenchman who had
painted Jimmy--she told herself, it would have been
comprehensible! But Warren, like all great men, had his simple,
almost childish, phases, and this was one of them!

She watched her guest of honor, when the evening came, with a
puzzled intensity. Magsie was in her glory, sparkling, chattering,
almost noisy. Her exquisite little white silk gown was so low in
the waist, and so short in the skirt, that it was almost no gown
at all, yet it was amazingly smart. She had touched her lips with
red, and her eyelids were cunningly given just a hint of
elongation with a black pencil. Her bright hair was pushed
severely from her face, and so trimly massed and netted as not to
show its beautiful quantity, and yet, somehow, one knew the