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“I’ll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can’t we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a picnic supper afterwards?”

“Now you’re talking!” Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smoothed slope of her shoulder. “Like fishing? Fishing is my middle name. I’ll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?”

“I used to be rather good at bezique.”

She knew that bezique was a game of cards—or a game of something else. Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita’s handsome, high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said humbly, “Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn’t it?”

While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation. She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott:

“These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that’s what I’m going out for. I’ll never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid to get out of the motor ‘bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley,ab the Wild Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma’ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys, and———You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod,ac but you ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B.V.D.’s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook.”

She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on:

“I’m sure I’m going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner——Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?”

Kennicott’s rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. “I’ll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott.” He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare. “There’s some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin’ diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you—but for heaven’s sake don’t tell him I said so—don’t you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph.”

No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark’s party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them:

“But I know whom I wouldn’t have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I’m sure he’s a regular heart-breaker. When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully.”

“Haw! Haw! Haw!” The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified. He had been called many things—loan-shark, skin-flint, tightwad, pussyfoot—but he had never before been called a flirt.

“He is wicked, isn’t he, Mrs. Dawson? Don’t you have to lock him up?”

“Oh no, but maybe I better,” attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face.

For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred café parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark’s bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused.

Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not