“Oh, I know how to buy, once I have the money to buy with! I got a whole set of that funny furniture with the twisted legs to Blake Whipple’s for our dining room. Only fifty-nine dollars! It was marked a hundred and fifteen but Whipple lemme have it because he got stuck with it. Folks in our town ain’t much on stylish stuff. They want chairs that has good strong legs, made to be set on and not much else.” “Undoubtedly!” “Madam, dinner is served,” came a somewhat sonorous voice off toward the left. A butler in complete evening livery—a rare and an awesome sight for Milly whose only contact with butlers had been in the motion pictures—stood by the dining-room door. Instantly the hum of conversation ceased. A rapier stab of fright pierced Milly’s vitals. Where was Nathan and would he wait for her? The wife abandoned the Cynthia person abruptly and frantically tried to pick her husband from the seven men all dressed alike. Horror of horrors!—Nathan was talking to that stout girl in silver-gray; she had a hand on his arm and they were moving toward the dining room. Milly had a wild impulse to flee. She would have flown if she had dared search out the dressing-room alone. In her pitiful panic young Mosely approached her. “May I take you in, Mrs. Forge?” he asked easily. “I guess so,” the girl responded dazedly. Mosely held out his arm but Milly did not essay to take it. The idea of such presumption! He should have taken _her_ arm, of course. All the fellows had done it at the Saturday night dances in Foresters Hall before she was married. So in a cold sweat and flaming fright, somehow she moved toward the great double doors. Soft music started playing behind a bank of palms on the landing. Milly forgot her terror for an instant at sight of that “wonderful” table. The overhead chandeliers had been extinguished. Shaded candle lamps were so concentrated that every part of the cloth was in radiant light. Upon the centerpiece of drawn work a low crystal bowl held a gay mixture of blossoms, mostly small roses. Milly wondered where the food was, what they intended to eat. All she saw in evidence were a few nuts and some “soup plates filled with cracked ice.” Then she came back to her dilemma. The “crowd” was wandering about the table, looking over the napery and silverware, horribly ill-bred, Milly thought. Then she grasped that they were reading names on “little cardboard signs” as she told her mother afterward. Inertia took Milly forward. With a little jolt she came upon her own name. It startled her. She sat down at once and then got up again—hastily. She expected that Nathan’s place would be beside her own; Mrs. Mosely would have fixed it that way if she knew anything. But apparently Mrs. Mosely didn’t know anything, because Milly found herself between two disturbingly strange men, one a “bald-headed old fool” and “a tall, sleek young man with a trick mustache who looked like Charley Chaplin.”