To-night, when he presently fell asleep, somewhat more comfortable in body, and soothed in spirit by the promise of a visit from the doctor, Rachael went into her own room and sinking into a deep chair sat staring stupidly at the floor. She did not think of the husband she had just left, nor of the formal dinner party being given, only half a mile away, to a great English novelist--a dinner to which the Breckenridges had of course been asked and upon which Rachael had weeks ago set her heart. She was tired, and her thoughts floated lazily about nothing at all, or into some opaque region of their own knowing, where the ills of the body might not follow. Presently Miss Vanderwall, clothed in a trailing robe of soft Arabian cotton, came briskly out of the bathroom, her short dark hair hanging in a mane about her rosy face. "Why so pensive, Rachael?" she asked cheerfully, pressing a button that lighted the circle of globes about the dressing-table mirror, and seating herself before it. But under her loose locks she sent a keen and concerned look at her hostess' thoughtful face. "Tired," Rachael answered briefly, not changing her attitude, but with a fleeting shadow of a smile. "How's Clancy?" "Asleep. He's wretched, poor fellow! Berry Stokes' bachelor dinner, you know. That crowd is bad for him." "I KNEW it must have been an orgy!" Miss Vanderwall declared vivaciously. "That was a silly slip of mine in the car. Billy doesn't know he went, I suppose?" "No, he promised her he wouldn't. But everyone was at the dinner. Some of them came home early, I believe. But it was all kept quiet, because Aline Pearsall is such a little shrinking violet, I suppose," Mrs. Breckenridge said. "The Pearsalls are to think it was just an impromptu affair. Billy and Aline of course have no idea what a party it was. But Clarence says that poor Berry was worse than he, and a few of them are still keeping it up. It's a shame, of course--" Her uninterested voice dropped into silence. "Men are queer," Miss Vanderwall said profoundly, busy with ivory-backed brushes, powders, and pastes. "The mystery to me--about men," mused Mrs. Breckenridge, her absent eyes upon the buckled slipper she held in her hand, "is not that they are as helpless as babies the moment anything goes wrong with their poor little heads or their poor little tummies, but that they work so hard, in spite of that, to increase the general discomfort of living. Women have a great deal of misery to bear, they are brave or cowardly about it as the case may be, but at least they endure and renounce and diet and keep early hours--or whatever's to be done--they TRY to lessen the sum of physical misery. But men go cheerily on--they smoke too much, and eat too much, and drink too much, and they bring the resulting misery sweetly and confidently to some woman to bear for them. It's hopeless!"