Mr. Harrison Orr lived till he was twenty-five in Indianapolis, the town of his birth, excepting the years spent in Chicago pursuing his literary and law courses. He inherited a small fortune and, after two years spent in "seeing the world," located in Memphis, Tennessee. Here, as an attorney and later as an investor, he was professionally, financially and socially successful. His father had been liberal in the use of wines and cordials, and young Orr himself always remained a "good fellow," just the kind of a man to attract a vivacious, socially proud daughter of the South. He was thirty-five when he married-- accounted an age of discretion. His experience with womankind was so ample that he should have made no mistake in his final, irrevocable choice, and, be it said to his honor, no one, not even the wife herself, ever knew by word or act of his, to the contrary. He and his Mississippi bride spent thirty years in apparent domestic tranquillity, until he died at sixty-five from a heart which refused longer to have its claims for purposeful living eternally answered by gin rickeys and nips of "straight Scotch." Mrs. Harrison Orr is unconsciously the unhappy "villain" of our tale. Her girlhood home was on a large sugar-plantation where she, as an only child, was reared to dominate her surroundings, while her parents made particular effort that she might shine socially. Parts of many years she lived in Washington in the home of a political relative, and attended a select girls' school. After her debut she spent the social winters at the Capitol where social niceties were developed with much attention to detail, and at home and while in Washington she was gratifyingly popular. "A brilliant conversationalist," she had heard herself called when fifteen, and the art of conversation, hitherto far from neglected, became by choice and practice her forte. Brilliancy in speech ever remained her only seriously attempted accomplishment. Clever of speech, from childhood, she had early learned to utilize this ability to attain any desired end. And talk she could, and talk she did, and as she grew older, by sheer talking she domineered every situation. It was her opinion when she married that at any time, with any listener, she could talk cleverly on any subject. As the years passed, during which she added little to her asset of knowledge, this art of fine speech gradually, but relentlessly, degenerated, and step by step she slipped down the paths of delicacy and fineness, through the selfishness of her insistent talkativeness. Harrison Orr never intimated that his evenings at home were hours of boredom, but in later years spent much time in the comparative quiet of his club. Few intellects can be so amply stored as to continue brilliant through decades of much speaking, and the sparkle of Mrs. Orr's conversation was gradually shrouded in the weariness of what a blunt neighbor termed her "inveterate gabble." As it must be, this woman of