“Oh, yes, I didn't tell you that, did I?” Perkins shook off his dejection. “The letter was received yesterday. In it she simply said she would like to visit us if convenient and be our guest for a little while. We were to wire our answer and our answer was, 'Come.' What the dickens else could we have said even if we had wanted to? All this that I have told you took place yesterday and since then consternation has reigned supreme. My mother's hair has been done up in curl-papers for the last thirty-six hours, tight twisted, and has given her a raging headache. The house is no better than a howling wilderness. I pledge you my sacred word of honor that I ate my supper last night on the back-stairs off a sewing-board held in my lap and I was mighty thankful to get it then. This morning I went without breakfast. Dinner I ate from a shelf in the back pantry with a soup ladle and all because Madame Dennie is somewhere between here and New York contemplating a descent upon us. I have taken curlpapers out of the water pitcher, and as I hope for mercy hereafter there was one in the cold soup forming the bulk of my dinner to-day.” Perkins became pensive for just the briefest space possible and a rather melancholy smile overspread his face. “I say, did you fellows ever eat soup—cold soup—with curl-papers? Because if you never did—don't. It's about the most thoroughly revolutionary thing a man can do.” “You haven't told us yet when she is coming,” Philip remarked. “When will it be, to-morrow?” “That's what we are looking forward to.” “How old is she, anyhow?” And Philip propounded one of the inquiries a young man is almost sure to make sooner or later concerning a woman. “Oh, dear me, I can't tell. Forty or fifty though, I should say at a guess.” Philip yawned. Madame's age made the whole affair seem very tame and unattractive to him. Perkins rambled on: “That's the deuce of it. She will be old enough to take an interest in me. Women are forever taking an interest in me—a controlling interest you know—forever thinking I should be at work at something or other, just to keep me out of scrapes. And that's all bosh! I don't think there's any use for me to work, except perhaps to kill time, and I really couldn't do that, for in the end time will kill me and I shall be laid out stiff you know, quite dead, with tuberoses—” “Limp you mean,” growled Franz correctively. “Where the devil did you ever get the notion that you could be stiff?” “I hope I didn't seem vain when I said women were interested in me, you know I mean those who are old enough to know better,” Perkins ventured with much meekness, folding his hands over a stomach of which Philip was wont to remark, much to its owner's agony, that it was coming rapidly to the front. “Of course you will invite us up to the house when your cousin comes,” the latter said. “Franz and I shall be immensely happy to call.”