"No," laughed Burnaby, "I suppose not. But while the mood is on me, don't disillusion me." Mrs. Ennis looked across at him with a smile. "You'll meet two very attractive people tonight, anyway," she said. "Oh, yes!" He leaned forward. "I had forgotten--who are they?" Mrs. Ennis spread her arms out along the chair. "There's Mary Rochefort," she answered, "and there's Robert Pollen, who's supposed to be the most alluring man alive." "Is it doing him any good?" "Well--" Mrs. Ennis looked up with a laugh. "You don't like him? Or perhaps you do?" Mrs. Ennis knit her brows in thought, her blue eyes dark with conjecture. "I don't know," she said at length. "Sometimes I think I do, and sometimes I think I don't. He's very good-looking in a tall, blond, pliable way, and he can be very amusing when he wants to be. I don't know." "Why not?" Mrs. Ennis wrinkled her nose in the manner of one who is being pushed to explanation. "I am not so sure," she confided, "that I admire professional philanderers as much as I did. Although, so long as they leave me alone--" "Oh, he's that, is he?" Mrs. Ennis corrected herself hastily. "Oh, no," she protested. "I shouldn't talk that way, should I? Now you'll have an initial prejudice, and that isn't fair--only--" she hesitated "I rather wish he would confine his talents to his own equals and not conjure young married women at their most vulnerable period." "Which is?" "Just when," said Mrs. Ennis, "they're not sure whether they want to fall in love again with their own husbands or not." Then she stopped abruptly. She was surprised that she had told Burnaby these things; even more surprised at the growing incisiveness of her voice. She was not accustomed to taking the amatory excursions of her friends too much to heart; she had a theory that it was none of her business, that perhaps some day she might want charity herself. But now she found herself perceptibly indignant. She wondered if it wasn't Burnaby's presence that was making her so. Sitting across from her, he made her think of directness and dependability and other traits she was accustomed to refer to as "primitive virtues." She liked his black, heavily ribbed evening stockings. Somehow they were like him. It made her angry with herself and with Burnaby that she should feel this way; be so moved by "primitive virtues." She detested puritanism greatly, and righteously, but so much so that she frequently mistook the most innocent fastidiousness for an unforgivable rigidity. "If they once do," she concluded, "once do fall in love with their husbands again, they're safe, you know, for all time."