She meant more than that, but it was hard to say and, after all, unnecessary. Mrs. Allenby gave her a little approbative tap on the shoulder. “Good girl,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I can see things. It isn’t always the useful woman a man likes. I can see you aren’t much for housekeeping--and babies. Some women aren’t. But just so as you make him happy”--she paused and finished on a beautifully soft note--“he’s a lovely boy.” It was rarely that Fliss felt that some one understood her. She felt it now. But both of them being very practical and unsentimental, they carried the discussion no further. Mrs. Allenby cloaked herself in her sharp efficiency and Fliss airily polished the plates. She told Matthew that night that she was going to get on well with his mother. It was then that he told her that she was adaptable. “I shall never forget how you acted that night Cecily’s baby was born. That was the first time I guessed how adaptable you were.” “That was a funny time,” said Fliss, somewhat coldly. They stayed a week with Mrs. Allenby and by the time they left Fliss had begun to be very jocose and free with her mother-in-law. She showed her how she was teaching Matthew to dance, she rendered popular vaudeville songs on the wheezy old piano, she exhibited all her trousseau lingerie to the old lady with a running fire of absurd comment, and tried to bestow a lace trimmed boudoir cap upon her. Then they left Peachtree for Chicago and spent a few weeks there, Matthew doing business while Fliss soaked her pagan soul in the luxury of hotels. Fliss loved hotels, their over-deep porcelain baths and the little breakfast tables with shiny silvered dishes and wasteful expanses of white linen, always immaculate. She liked having nothing to do with the machinery of her comfort, to have a telephone at her bedside which could whisk servitors out of space to do her bidding. And she liked the great hotel lounges and parlors, with their heavy commercialized luxury of velvet and gilt, their desks with low lights at which one might sit and write letters while engaging the attention of any good-looking men who might be passing. Padded corridors, handsome men and luxurious women, dining-rooms pompous with elaborate service, the ceaseless flow of people who might be coming from anything and going anywhere--it all completely captured that roving spirit of excitement which was Fliss’s imagination. She watched with ecstasy, copying here, adapting there, learning every minute.