“I couldn’t decline,” he returned, easily. “You didn’t give me a chance to.” “Hobart, that’s really too much! You stopped me—interrupted me when I was in the very act of declining for you.” “That was the reason,” he explained. “I couldn’t let you decline for me. It might have looked as though I let my wife do embarrassing things for me that I haven’t backbone enough to do for myself.” “How diplomatic!” she said. “May I ask your _real_ reason for accepting her invitation after what I’d just told you about her? Perhaps, though, it was merely to hurt Mildred and irritate me. In that case, you made a perfect success of what you intended.” “It wasn’t precisely that,” he laughed. “For one thing, if what you and Mildred believe has any foundation, why, old John certainly needs a chaperon; and, for another thing, I wanted the chance to see for myself if there is any reason to believe what you told me.” “Oh, _so_?” She uttered a little cry of triumph, and laughed in the tone of her outcry. “So you’re not so sure as you were a little while ago, when you implied that my mind was wandering! So you see there _is_ something in it?” “Only this: I admit the possibility that Julietta might want to have him attached to her as a sort of providing friend, to do little useful things for her and——” “‘Little useful things’?” his wife said, scornfully. “Don’t you understand what type she belongs to? Only a few minutes ago you paid her caddy for her, and John rented a locker for her. Last week he got her a new set of golf clubs, Mildred told me. Julietta complained of her old ones, and he sent away for the most expensive clubs you can get in the country. When she said you put your friends into fortunes, she meant more than just to flatter you about the fortune you’ve put John Tower into; she meant you to begin to get the idea into your head that it would be pleasant some day to put _her_ into one—or her worthless old father, perhaps!” Then, as Hobart laughed loudly at an idea apparently so far-fetched, Anne defended it. “Oh, I know it was only her impulse and not deliberate, just a chance shot of hers; but she never misses a possibility, and that possibility was somewhere in the back of her head. Of course, it isn’t you, but John that she’s playing for. She’d _rather_ have played for you; but she didn’t see any chance, of course. She discovered John’s weakness and did see the chance with him.” “What weakness, Anne?” “Why, the poor old thing’s childlike acceptance of women at the face value they put upon themselves, and his quaint belief that they say everything they mean and mean everything they say—just as he does himself. Mildred’s helpless because he’s such a helpless idealist; he tells her the only thing he can’t bear in a woman is when she’s so small-minded as to speak slightingly of any other woman! All Mildred can do is to suffer and not speak. I never saw anything so pitiful as what she did when you hurt her feelings so terribly.”