“You know English couples often borrow a country house from friends to settle in for the honeymoon, if they’ve none of their own,” she continued. “There is nothing lovelier than a newly furnished country house, all white enamelled furniture, flowered chintz, and muslin draperies, with the maids in light blue or pink chambray and ruffled bib aprons; besides, Agatha, you know that to be asked to a week-end party is more of a compliment than a dinner. I shall make Margie invite me to the very first of them. Then, of course, she will be sure to go in for a specialty,—golf, tennis, motoring, or the garden craze; everybody rushes you out to see the garden now, and tells you how many loads of earth it took to fill it in, and who the landscape architect was. “I only hope Margie will have an English garden with wooden benches; the seats in an Italian garden have no backs, and are _so_ cold if you sit out in the moonlight, in a thin petticoat; and of course that’s one of the things that one goes to week-end parties for, the moonlight spooning, I mean.” “You may banish all your pictures of that sort of thing,” said Agatha, speaking in a tone in which mystery and disgust were blended. “There will be no draperies or garden seats or maids; my sister has but _one_ person to do everything, an old black woman named Juno, who wears a turban, and who, I believe, was Billy’s nurse. As for the house, it’s in the middle of a field, with some gloomy woods behind it; there’s hardly a thing in it but wall-papers, Japanese matting, and flower vases, for Marjory has absolutely sent all of her magnificent silver and bric-à-brac to storage at Tiffany’s. For the rest, they’ve a ginger-coloured pony and an absurd buggy, by way of a trap, and I shouldn’t be surprised to find that they all, including the pony, take their meals in the kitchen, and that Billy wears an apron and waits on Marjory and Juno, for she says they intend to lead the simple life this summer. Think of it! Deliberately committing social suicide.” Agatha’s voice had a tragic break in it. Poor Agatha, who had never committed a social error in her life, and had made the most of everything almost to the extent of separating a poached egg on toast garnished with parsley into three separate courses, toast, egg, and salad! Yet at thirty-eight she had acquired nothing but an equivocal sense of correctness and a complexion that refused either to stand the light of day or to receive graciously and absorb the improvers that the owner lavished upon it. Before Pussy Taylor or any one else could recover from their astonishment, the door was flung open, the butler announced in his formal drawl,—Mrs. Rodney Kent, and Marjory herself came in, stopping short in the middle of the room with a quizzical expression as she saw the very conscious faces of her friends.