She told him of Hartley's change of apartments--it was the thought of relating these circumstances to Repellier more than to any one else that had troubled her for days--and how Mrs. Spaulding and she had promised to give him a little house-warming. "And so we're going to give him a dinner, a most wonderful dinner!" she cried. "And I'm doing it all by myself!" Repellier glanced interrogatively at the three busy servants. "Of course I have to have a little help, but that's a secret. Our women at home--in the South--aren't taught to do this sort of thing, you know. Help, with us, is so easy to get, most of us never learn things. When I was a girl in Kentucky, I don't believe I ever went into a kitchen more than once a month. And now I've just discovered the fascination of the fryingpan." Cordelia had what Repellier called "the dangerous gift of familiarity." As he looked at her he remembered how apt Miss Short's description of her had been: "the girl with the semaphore eyes." She could be as open and ingenuous as a child at times, and when caring to, could guilelessly brush aside all the restraining conventionalities with one airy sweep of the hand. "I suppose you realize it's the oldest weapon you have in that eternal warfare of the elemental woman against the elemental man," half laughed Repellier. "Feed the brutes," she laughed. Then she looked up quickly. "But I'm not arming for any particular engagement with the enemy." He had a way of giving generalities a specific application which she did not like. "I suppose a few thousand years ago some shock-headed, hairy-bodied creature with a stone hatchet crawled on all fours into a cave and beheld a rat-browed, matted-haired she-thing stooping over a gory piece of toasting bear meat, and his heart went out to her at once." "Or his hatchet," broke in Cordelia. "And I suppose out of the mumbling delight of that hairy savage has come what we moderns call family love, and out of the way in which the she-thing groveled and thrust the hot meat on a slab of stone and crawled with it to her lord and master-to-be has flowered what we call courtship." "And just as her happy yelping," went on Cordelia satirically, "was the root of our speech, I suppose that hunk of half-cooked flesh was the root of this _terrine de foie gras_." She sniffed at her delicacy appreciatively. "How much nicer the modern way is," she added, dreamily, "marriage by capture transformed into marriage by chef." "But _has_ it changed so much, after all?" asked Repellier, looking about at the half-filled hampers. Cordelia thought it over before her mirror that evening as she dressed, and she rediscovered two truths. One was that it really hadn't changed so much, and the other was that Mr. Repellier often said things with a sort of double meaning, which, she knew, was always going to fill her with a hazy distrust of him.