Aunt Selina was for going out at once and “fixing him up,” as she put it, but Dallas gently interfered. “I wouldn’t, Miss Caruthers,” he said, in the deferential manner he had adopted toward her. “You don’t know what it may be. He’s been looking spotty all evening.” “It might be scarlet fever,” Max broke in cheerfully. “I say, scarlet fever on a Mongolian--what color would he be, Jimmy? What do yellow and red make? Green?” “Orange,” Jim said shortly. “I wish you people would remember that we are trying to eat.” The fact was, however, that no one was really eating, except Mr. Harbison who had given up trying to understand us, considering, no doubt, our subdued excitement as our normal condition. Ages afterward I learned that he thought my face almost tragic that night, and that he supposed from the way I glared across the table, that I had quarreled with my husband! “I am afraid you are not well,” he said at last, noticing my food untouched on my plate. “We should not have come, any of us.” “I am perfectly well,” I replied feverishly. “I am never ill. I--I ate a late luncheon.” He glanced at me keenly. “Don’t let them stay and play bridge tonight,” he urged. “Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she not? And you are really fagged. You look it.” “I think it is only ill humor,” I said, looking directly at him. “I am angry at myself. I have done something silly, and I hate to be silly.” Max would have said “Impossible,” or something else trite. The Harbison man looked at me with interested, serious eyes. “Is it too late to undo it?” he asked. And then and there I determined that he should never know the truth. He could go back to South America and build bridges and make love to the Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?) and think of me always as a married woman, married to a dilettante artist, inclined to be stout--the artist, not I--and with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made buttons and believed in the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was the other man’s wife and had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she had to carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate and matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at first to a hands-off-she-is-my-host’s-wife attitude at last. “It can never be undone,” I said soberly. Well, that’s the picture as nearly as I can draw it: a round table with a low centerpiece of orchids in lavenders and pink, old silver candlesticks with filigree shades against the somber wainscoting; nine people, two of them unhappy--Jim and I; one of them complacent--Aunt Selina; one puzzled--Mr. Harbison; and the rest hysterically mirthful. Add one sick Japanese butler and grind in the mills of the gods.