"It is your duty to lecture her soundly on her descent into the Bohemian ranks of roaming 'bachelor girls,' who, running after tinsel kites they call 'careers,' turn their backs on all home duties, forsake every form of genuine feminine domesticity, cast family ties to the winds and herd in tenements, boat-houses and mountain camps. Professional female tramps!" "I am very sure he will agree with me in thinking that Mrs. Churchill is cruel in smothering her innocent friend under an avalanche of opprobrious epithets. My sole 'family tie' happens to be Uncle Hollis, and I hold fast to him, though to do so necessitates surrender of 'home duties' in order to keep under his protecting wing. Not at all a 'bachelor girl' if you please; but having recently bidden a reluctant and tearful adieu to my thirty-first birthday, I have deliberately selected a very different and more subdued type of serene old-maidhood--the effete and much-derided spinster of less degenerate days, a hundred years ago-who studied Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Opie, spent all tender affections on pugs, canaries and knitting needles, sternly confined hilarity within the prim boundary of the minuet, and revered chaperons almost as devoutly as the 'Apostles' Creed.'" The announcement of dinner rearranged the groups, and escorted by Captain Winstead, Devota was seated at an unusually large circular table where sixteen persons found ample room. There were no candelabra so suggestive of childish "peek-a-boo" or the tinsel frippery of Christmas trees, and the colored tapers of juvenile birthday fêtes; but from the ceiling a flood of light fell from clustered electric globes upon glass, silver and the snowy damask cloth, wherein woven wreathes of orchids seemed to stand out as though embroidered in satin tissues. Neither tall vase nor _bonbonnière_ impeded view of the entire table, and in the center a long, low silver shell was filled with stephanotis and amber-edged Farleyense fronds, while in front of each guest lay a slender spray of daphne starred with bloom. Mrs, Churchill sat between the Governor, assigned to Mrs. Roscoe, and the Bishop, whose next neighbor was the vivacious young widow Mrs. Van Allen, a recent donor to his favorite church of an old and very costly silver sacrament service that Cellini was said to have embossed and engraved. Gradually the overture of general chatter diminished, and as conversation became dialogues between individual couples, Devota found it difficult to fix her attention upon Captain Winstead's remarks, to which her replies were brief and perfunctory. Notwithstanding her efforts to resist the impulse, her eyes turned often to the smiling face of the man immediately opposite her, and she was aware that he studiously avoided looking at her.