Olive Keltridge was a born hostess. She had been prompt to grasp the fact that guests should be amused as well as fed, prompt to realize that a family skeleton can easily be converted to a family Jack-in-the-box, if only he can be snatched from the closet and manipulated with a little tact. Upon the first occasion of her father's failure to line up beside her in season to receive his guests, she had gone in search of him a little petulantly, had reappeared beside him, hot-cheeked and a trifle sulky. That one experience had been the last one of its kind, however. Olive had lain awake, that night, to ponder on the interval between the time of her discovering her sire, his hair rampant, his necktie shockingly awry and his sleeves rolled up, messing contentedly among his pots and pans of cultures and totally oblivious of his waiting guests, and the much later time when she had literally driven him, irreproachably clad and beaming delightedly, into the drawing-room ahead of her. She had thought it all over, all, from the quality of the delayed dinner down to the things that the guests were likely to be saying in her absence. Then, young as she was, she took her resolution. After that, she would catch her father suddenly, and bring him back, red-handed. A man like Doctor Keltridge ought not to be reduced to the conventional dead level of his fellow townsmen; it would be a waste of rare material. Rather, as the phrase is, he should be featured. And Olive proceeded to feature him accordingly, to the solid satisfaction of her father and to the no small rapture of his old-time cronies.