“Didn’t you like her?” Miss Townsend demanded abruptly. She had caught the reserve in his tone; so had Dr. Ray and had interpreted it differently. “Could I say so?” he asked gaily. “But I do like Miss Gilbert—very much.” His hostess looked at him a little regretfully. She liked those she liked to like each other—and she had mistrusted his tone. But Dr. Ray threw him a shrewder glance. She, too, mistrusted his tone, and her mistrust took a different trend. Able in all her craft, diagnosis was her forte. She rarely erred in it. It was a great physician, the slender patrician that almost lounged, so assured and easy her sitting, in Miss Townsend’s great-grandfather’s favorite chair, a long history of sorrow and service carved on the face in which time and life had cut many, but only beautiful lines. Soft waves of snow covered a graceful, queenly-held head, and the long, thin hands, lying loosely on the great chair’s big arm-knobs, were as masterful as they were lovely—the polished finger-nails as rosy and mooned as a girl’s. She was a great physician, adding distinction to the profession it had cost her a hard, bitter fight—and sometimes a tortured one—to enter. But the physician armed with a genius for absolute diagnosis should not find professional greatness too far or too difficult a cry. She gave Sên King-lo a long steady look. “You don’t know the Snows, do you?” Miss Julia asked him—more to retreat from a _cul-de-sac_ she felt a trifle rasped than because she cared to know. “Yes, Madame, I do—Sir Charles and his wife. I have not had the pleasure of meeting the small ones yet.” “Oh—yes—I suppose you diplomatic-staff people all know each other, more or less, whether you care to or not.” “We are apt to meet.” “And I daresay you know every one in Washington now,” Julia remarked, rather purringly. She was proud of the place her once cold-shouldered protége had gained in the capital’s society that she herself rather scorned. “I know a good many.” And this time Dr. Ray thought that there was nothing forced in the indifference of his tone. “Do you like _them_—the Snows?” Miss Julia questioned again. It was her habit, and Sên’s delight, that she always questioned him as she liked. “Very much,” he told her cordially. “I like him,” Miss Townsend said, with no uncertain emphasis on the pronoun. Sên King-lo sprang to the defense of an absent woman on whose face he but now had seen maternity’s beautiful blazon. “I like Lady Snow, Madame,” he remarked. “I am sure there is a great deal more in her than the _chic_ prettiness that one sees and the gay banter one hears.” “Do you?” From any one else the slight but patrician sniff would have sounded a rudeness. “I,” she continued, “_know_ that there is very much more in Ivy Gilbert than shows on the surface. I am very fond of Ivy. I wish she had a gayer time. Girls should be gay. You liked Ivy, Elenore, didn’t you?” “Yes, I liked her,” the other said promptly. “And I like her face.”