He had had a stupid evening. He couldn’t make the women talk to him. He was not “a ladies’ man,” and every mother’s daughter of them took in the truth at a glance. The men gabbled over their wine of what did not interest him, of clubs and horse races, and the fluctuations of fancy stocks. He neither smoked nor drank, and was the only man there who did not do both. His wife’s music was to him the only redeeming feature of the occasion, and he would have enjoyed that more in his own parlor. But she was enraptured with everything and full of delightful anticipations. “Everybody had been so nice and kind, and what did ill-natured people mean by saying there was no real sociability among fashionable people? For her part, she believed that the higher one mounted in the social scale the more genuine goodness and refined feeling she would find.” Several of the ladies had promised to call upon her, and, as one said, “to take her in with them.” Arthur hearkened silently. He had never been able to give her such pleasures, a fact that smote him hard when he saw how zestfully she drank of the newly opened spring. He would not “wet-blanket” her enthusiasm, so did not hint at a discovery made to him by a chance remark of a guest to the host. Invitations for this particular dinner party had been out for ten days. “Then Susie and I were second fiddles,” inferred the sensible cashier. “I wonder why she asked us at all!” PART III. MR. CORNELL’S unspoken suspicion that Mrs. Hitt would drop her school-friend as suddenly as she had picked her up was in a way to be falsified, if the events of the next few months were to be taken as testimony. The two matrons were nearly inseparable—shopping, driving, walking, and visiting together. For Susie had a New York visiting list speedily, and almost every name stood for an introduction by her indefatigable “trainer.” The epithet was the taciturn husband’s, and, as may be surmised, was never uttered audibly. Susie’s wardrobe, furniture, table—her very modes of speech—sustained variations that amazed old friends and confounded him who knew her best. The cherished black velvet she had thought “handsome enough for any occasion” was pronounced “quaintly becoming, but too old for the wearer by twenty-five years.” Slashed and dashed and lashed with gold-color, it did duty as a house evening gown. For small luncheons, she had a tailor-made costume of fawn-colored cloth embroidered and combined with silk; for “swell” luncheons, a rich silk—black ground relieved by narrow crimson stripes, and made en _demi-train_. For at-home afternoons were two tea gowns; before she received her second dinner invitation, she had made by Mrs. Hitt’s dressmaker—(“a Frenchwoman who doesn’t know enough yet to charge American prices, my dear, and I hold it to be a sin to _throw_ money away!”) a robe of white brocade and sea-green velvet, in which garb she showed like a moss-rose bud, according to her dear friend and trumpeter.