We had voted it cosier without lamps or candles, for this odorous twilight was far more companionable. Odorous, for there were a great number of pink roses about. I imagine that someone must have sent them--because there were not any daffodils obtainable, by reason of the late and nipping frost--in honour of Stella's second wedding anniversary. 3 "Peter says you talk to everybody that way," quoth she,--almost resentfully, and after a pause. "Oh!" said I. For it was really no affair of Peter's. And so-- "Peter, everybody tells me, is getting fat," I announced, presently. Stella witheringly glanced toward the region where my waist used to be. "He isn't!" said she, indignant. "Quite like a pig, they assure me," I continued, with relish. She objected to people being well-built. "His obscene bloatedness appears to be an object of general comment." Silence. I stirred my tea. "Dear Peter!" said she. And then--but unless a woman of Stella's sort is able to exercise a proper control over her countenance, she has absolutely no right to discuss her husband with his bachelor friends. It is unkind; for it causes them to feel like social outcasts and lumbering brutes and Peeping Toms. If they know the husband well, it positively awes them; for, after all, it is a bit overwhelming, this sudden glimpse of the simplicity, and the credulity, and the merciful blindness of women in certain matters. Besides, a bachelor has no business to know such things; it merely makes him envious and uncomfortable. Accordingly, "Stella," said I, with firmness, "if you flaunt your connubial felicity in my face like that, I shall go home." She was deaf to my righteous rebuke. "Peter is in Washington this week," she went on, looking fondly into the fire. "I had planned a party to celebrate to-day, but he was compelled to go--business, you know. He is doing so well nowadays," she said, after a little, "that I am quite insufferably proud of him. And I intend for him to be a great lawyer--oh, much the greatest in America. And I won't ever be content till then." "H'm!" said I. "H'm" seemed fairly non-committal. "Sometimes," Stella declared, irrelevantly, "I almost wish I had been born a man." "I wish you had been," quoth I, in gallant wise. "There are so few really attractive men!" Stella looked up with a smile that was half sad. "I'm just a little butterfly-woman, aren't I?" she asked. "You are," I assented, with conviction, "a butterfly out of a queen's garden--a marvellous pink-and-gold butterfly, such as one sees only in dreams and--er--in a London pantomime. You are a decided ornament to the garden," I continued, handsomely, "and the roses bow down in admiration as you pass, and--ah--at least, the masculine ones do."