Guests already arrived, unpacked, tubbed, seated at dinner, who discover equally suddenly that their lines are too short. wrangles with Guests who "can't possibly play in blue." wrangles with Guests who "can't possibly play in pink." wrangles with Guests who insist upon kissing in every act. wrangles with Guests who refuse to kiss in any act, it was my Husband's ingenious idea to organize instead an annual Play that should never dream it was a Play, acted by actors who never even remotely suspected that they were acting, evolving a plot that no one but the Almighty, Himself, could possibly foreordain. We call this Play "_Rainy Week_." Yet, do not, I implore you, imagine for a moment that by any such simple little trick as shifting all blame to the weather, all praise to the Almighty, _Care_ has been eliminated from the enterprise. It is only indeed at the instigation of this trick that the real hazard begins. For a Play after all is only a Play, be it humorous, amorous, murderous, adulterous,--a soap-bubble world combusting spontaneously of its own effervescence. But life is life and starkly real if not essentially earnest. And the merest flicker of the merest eyelid in one of life's real emotions has short-circuited long ere this with the eternities themselves! It's just this chance of "short-circuiting with the eternities" that shifts the pucker from a Host's brow to his spine! No lazy, purring, reunion of old friends this _Rainy Week_ of ours, you understand? No dully congenial convocation of in-bred relatives? No conference on literature,--music,--painting? No symposium of embroidery stitches? Nor of billiard shots? But the deliberate and relentlessly-planned assemblage of such distinctly diverse types of men and women as prodded by unusual conditions of weather, domicile, and propinquity, will best act and re-act upon each other in terms inevitably dramatic, though most naively unrehearsed! "Vengeance is mine!" said the Lord. "Very considerable psychologic, as well as dramatic satisfaction is now at last ours!" confess your humble servants. In this very sincere if somewhat whimsical dramatic adventure of _Rainy Week_, the exigencies of our household demand that the number of actors shall be limited to eight. Barring the single exception of Husband and Wife no two people are invited who have ever seen each other before. Destiny plays very much more interesting tricks we have noticed with perfect strangers than she does with perfect friends!