"There's Betty Stuart over there," Mrs. Rainbow remarked, proud of the ease with which she handled the nickname. "My, how ill she looks! You know she had typhoid pneumonia in New York. She looks as if she were going to walk into her grave." "Perhaps it wasn't just typhoid," Mrs. Bushfield added; "they tell strange stories. Her husband didn't go on once while she was ill." "Couldn't get away, poor man!" The two laughed, while Mrs. Buchanan looked at them coldly. "Yes, this is the best restaurant we have," Mrs. Bushfield explained apologetically to the guest from out of town. "Chicago has miserable hotels. Wretched food, too. You can't help it, my dear,"--she turned good-humoredly to Helen, and then concluded with the comfortable superiority of abuse,--"but Chicago is still a village." Men and women were moving noiselessly to and fro over the thickly carpeted floor that seemed to give off an odor of stale food. The dull red walls were already streaked here and there by soot, and the coarse lace curtains at the windows had been washed to a dirty gray in fruitless effort to make them clean. Behind their folds on the window-ledges there had gathered a thick sediment of ashes and coal dust, and beneath this the white paint was smutched with soot. Nevertheless, the ladies accustomed to the unconquerable dirt of the city ate their luncheon undisturbed. With the coming of the sweetbreads Mrs. Buchanan was saying confidentially to Mrs. Rainbow:-- "She's quite done for herself, you know. Mrs. Antony Crawford says that she will not have her again at her house. I should think that her mother would take her away. They say that Stanwood Phillips, too, has disgraced himself at Yale--awfully fast. But Venetia must be a perfect little fool. She might have had Stephen Lane." "So might any girl who had money these ten years," Mrs. Freddie Stewart remarked positively. "Beast of a temper, that man. I pity the girl he gets." ... "I must tell you,--they were at the Ritz last summer when we were, and positively they didn't know enough French to order their food. Their chauffeur used to take them about, and he would go anywhere he had a mind to, you know. Positively helpless. So we took pity on them, you know, and showed them things for a time." On the other side of the table Mrs. Crawford's voice was raised in protest to Helen. "You can't shop in this place. Steele's has got as bad as the rest. I go to New York for everything." ... "Isn't Sembrich getting too fat to sing?" ... "Who is that new tenor? I heard him in London last spring. He was fine." ... At last Helen ventured to say, "We should be starting, if we are to hear the Leonore overture." "Oh! bother the overture. Let's stay here and talk until it's time for Sembrich. The rest of it is such a bore," Mrs. Rainbow protested, nursing covetously her ice.