mentioned, talked on about Keats and Shelley and Browning as if there'd never been any Strindbergs and Amy Lowells. And to think of his scorning Monsieur Drang, the Great Drang, whom Sorrell, the Great Sorrell, envied! No, Adelaide Idid not like that leer in her husband's eyes. Exactly what did it mean? What had he in store? Was he harboring some secret revenge? Revenge for what? Could it be that he was going to spend the evening-worse perhaps with a— woman?

Against any such possibility, she would show Phil what her house could be like, what kind of an evening he had missed by not staying at home. She would ask Sarah and Miriam and her old friends to dine, and meet and hear Monsieur Drang. She would explain to Monsieur Drang that she was obliged for old time's sake to have them. For her sake he would forgive their presence. For her sake he would deign to play his works to them, the philistines.

"Miss Pether! Miss Pether! Will you get Mrs. Sarah-Mrs. Jessum Preston on the telephone? Say I will speak . . . No, no, dear children! Mother is busy now. Go with Miss Pether. She is on her way to tell you a story."

As the children retreated, more in response to Miss Pether's frightened commands than because they placed reliance on their mother's promises, Adelaide picked up a buffer from her low-mirrored dressing-table, and rubbed it across her exquisite fingernails to demonstrate to herself that she was busy, mindful meanwhile of how sad it was that she had grown away from her girlhood friends, above them, out of their reach.

"Yes-switch Mrs. Preston on here, Miss Pether . . . Oh, Sarah! How are you? H'm, h'm. Yes, Sarah! Monsieur Drang is coming here to-night to play some of his own compositions, and I thought it would be a treat to you if you came to dine and hear them. What, Sarah? Who is Monsieur Drang? Why Sarah! My! My! Aren't you losing your grip though! Why, Monsieur

Drang is the greatest composer alive. Yes. Sorrell says he's the greatest since Wagner. What's that, Sarah? You're dying to see him? Of course. Oh! Sorrell! No. This is Monsieur Drang whom Sorrell is so jealous of. Yes. Much greater than Sorrell. Oh my sakes yes! . . . Well, why can't you bring your guests over after dinner then?” Adelaide made a languishing move

ment.

"You say Jessum won't want to? Well, can't you leave him at home? Oh yes, please do, and come, Sarah, please! Well, I know how you long to, Sarah. What a pity! Such an opportunity for you! You oughtn't to miss it.-Central -Central-Sarah-Sarah-?"

Adelaide stopped herself from languishing once more against the back of her chair. Think of a woman having a husband like Jessum Preston! That man had wrecked Sarah's whole life. He had reduced her to a pulp. She didn't have an ounce of free will left. She thought and lived and abstained just for that fool of a man. To think of a husband not letting his wife avail herself of the opportunity to be swept by Monsieur Drang!

"Miss Pether? Miss Pether? Get Mrs. Estes-Mrs. Benjamin Estes-on the line."

"Yes, madam."

"And Miss Pether? Come back here a minute: I noticed that there are green scummy places on the children's teeth. If you take that thing I use on my nails, an orange stick you know, and use some pumice and a strong cloth, I am sure you can get it off. There is a horrid dark green scum forming over the children's teeth."

"Yes, madam."

Adelaide sighed with satisfaction that she had remedied this difficulty so readily and so effectually, so differently from the way Sarah Preston would have done it, the memory of whose inveterate puttering over her children's ailments had prompted her to say something to Miss Pether about the dark green scum

it had irritated her of late to notice on the children's teeth.

"Helloa, Miriam? Monsieur Drang, as you doubtless may have heard, is coming here to-night to play some of his own compositions, and I thought you would like to dine, you and Benjamin, and share the honor. What, Miriam? What? What? Benjamin objects to him because he is German? Gracious me, Miriam, where have you been? His mother speaks the most exquisite French, he says, you ever prayed heaven to hear."

But there was no use arguing with a frou-frou like Miriam who had a husband who had anti-German prejudices like Benjamin Estes. She'd be blamed-there!-if she'd go and rescue Sarah from the philistine ruts Jessum Preston had got her into, any more than she'd call up Miriam or any of their kind ever again. Rutridden and blinded by prejudices, let them all go, let them find solace in the sort of beaux they had learned in Miss Dalrymple's school to look up to!

Adelaide hummed a bit of Grieg, grateful

the florists for objets and flowers to make everything enchanting, which objets and flowers she directed Miss Pether to place in destinations suggested by the thought of what Phil liked and the memory of what Monsieur Drang detested, actuated sometimes by the hope that she was doing it all for Phil and sometimes by the belief that she was doing it all for Monsieur Drang.

to Monsieur Drang for the beauty of it and the help it was to her in deciding how best to get through the interval before evening should draw near. She had Miss Pether call up Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Rosenburg and Mr. Epstein. (Artists were much more gratifying after all than men!) She had Miss Pether call up those nice creatures whom Phil so obtusely dubbed her frumps. She had Miss Pether ransack the house and VOL. CXLV.-No. 868.-56

Now, at last, for the coquettish point of view, sometimes called Fate's:

The appointed hour

was near.

Adelaide, clad in an unruly looking mass of glitter that Monsieur Drang once said was

à la grande nuit barbare, looked neither like the tender, incorrigible, spoiled babyish beauty Tracey loved so, nor like anything at all to do with Tahiti. She looked marvelously like Adelaide-the flower of untrained womanhood, lured away from satisfaction in the mere roles of yesterday, and uncertain what new one to fill. Had she been born the advance agent of a circus, it would have been simple enough, and the métier of her

birth would have absorbed her utterly, no matter what newfangled notions might be the rage. But she was born to be merely a lady in an era when to be merely a lady was to Adelaide's temperament too obviously old-fashionedshe must be dans le mouvement, to steal a page from Monsieur Drang. For some such reason she had stumbled onto hunting these modern lions. To be sure, the distinction between hunting the old kind

of lions her grandmother and mother and aunts had hunted, and hunting this new kind that hadn't been hunted so much yet, was attenuated, but so was the distinction between one restless feminine role and another, from Cleopatra's to Emmeline Pankhurst's. An attenuation of that sort was seldom subtle enough to bother Adelaide. Nevertheless, like all great hunters, she presupposed big game, and sometimes longed for a lion that had been acclaimed enough by the world to. allay her least wonder as to his species, when she would gladly have sacrificed even being dans le mouvement to number a Shakespeare, or at least a Brahms, among her trophies. Her infrequent moments of repose were like pauses between flights, and her movements like those of a nymph or bird, assuming that with both nymphs and birds thought and action are merged, neither preceding the other. Praxiteles would have been proud of her face had he modeled it, though it wore an expression antipodal to Praxitelism, that of one avid to get what she wanted without at all knowing what that was.

She wanted, for example, as she stood at the end of her long drawing-room, waiting to receive her guests, Phil. She wanted his handsome presence there, to help make her worthy of them, and to help make them worthy of her. She wanted also to know how long before Monsieur Drang would come. Her expression in consequence subsided to that which Tracey was confused into calling the tender one he so loved. If something didn't happen soon, it would change to the one of desperate eagerness for distraction, that expression which had stimulated Monsieur Drang to fabricate to her' about the glories of Tahiti.

But, fortunately, something did happen soon. She heard the sound of her own automobile approaching. Dear Monsieur Drang at last! She ran to the mirror in a delirium of joy at having so much to do so fast, and looked at herself inspirationally, patting her hair more

into an adagio or allegro-whichever it should turn out to inspire.

In another moment Monsieur Drang flapped through the door, almost before she had finished, and as quickly as his plump body and short legs and flat feet would allow, his forearms raised at an acute angle from the elbows, in a studied tizzy, his baldness sheeny despite the becoming lights. Adelaide saw the blood rush to his bald spot when he kissed her hand, not realizing that it was the stairs and his plumpness and age and stooping made it rush, rather than the effect of herself standing regally above him.

once more

"Oui! Je suis arrivé-how do you say in Inglish? yes! I have come," he waxed at once into the melodramatic pose of declaiming, careful to work himself up to the banal pitch of bombast he liked best and rightly believed most took her breath away. "Le bon dieuGod himself-has decreed we meet again! Voilà! I behold you, the queen, -the-the-how do you say it in Inglish? la reine of Tahiti! Ah but-mais je comprends-I comprehend you have been reading the-that volume of the great Schopenhauer I to you have given-parceque-for-I deploreI trouve you à la moi-même une célèbre -a genius, do you say in Inglish?—en grand désespoir-n'est-ce pas? . . . Mon amie! Il y a une île . . . Non! non! Madame! pardon! . . . tu es trop sympathique!... Oui. Oui.”

Adelaide raised a hand in protest at Monsieur Drang's word désespoir, followed by île, for she must, for Phil's sake, keep Monsieur Drang from going as far as she momentarily wanted him, and felt sure he wanted, to go. But a gesture like that was all Monsieur Drang ever required in order not to go too far.

"Pardon-I have been to my pooblisherrs," Monsieur Drang facilely pursued, grateful to her for switching him to himself so quickly from all necessary compliments to her; "They have told me that my last work—"

Adelaide started as if she had been attractively assaulted.

Monsieur Drang only shut his eyes and opened them in recognition of his so accidental tact. "Yes, ma plus belle dame! The oboe Fantaisie-poème neurotique-the one that sprang from your forehead to me, and brought me dreams of toi et moi, in l'île barbare of Tahiti!"

Adelaide flourished a hand by way of protest ecstatique, calculating if "ecstatique" was idiomatic, which made Monsieur Drang fairly wheeze in delight of having done his duty to her further still so casually, so poignantly.

"My oboe Fantaisie is greater, they me tell, they, my pooblisherrs, than anything submitted to them since Beethoven! Oh, but Madame! Be not overjoyed! They-my pooblisherrsgrant this justice to me only because they have heard it from anotheranother whom than-how do you say in

Inglish? the populace is equal to, as not to me! The canaille! Yes they, my pooblisherrs, admit that my oboe Fantaisie, by you inspired-Non! Non! Pardon, ma belle!-is so magnifique parcequebecause they have been told so by Monsieur Sorrell! Yes. To him I played it last vinter. Think! To the Great Sorrell! To him, the man whose wife's riches have établi, as I would be established, and encore, if I had a wife like toi!"

With that Monsieur Drang succumbed to the sofa, which was too high for his legs and too billowy for his plumpness, but from where, with the surcease of standing which it afforded, he could better make his specious face convincing. But Adelaide, who at his last words felt that she had been another time attractively assaulted, and was going to be over and over again if she did not put a stop

to it, raised an elegant arm as if to warn him that somebody was approaching.

Monsieur Drang's ears were good. By a mighty effort he brought his stuffed, sparrowy entity down on to the rug at her feet, expostulating: "But Madame adores Monsieur Sorrell! The great world-alas-the canaille!-adores Sorrell! I adore Sorrell! Parbleu! You would not have me your slave-not lament that except for his vast compliment to me, his friend, they-my pooblisherrs-would never have believed how immortelle was the oboe Fantaisie by you inspired!"

With which Monsieur Drang applied his heavy lips to Adelaide's hand, looking very much like an expatriated rat nibbling at strange cheese; whereupon she unequivocally urged him to arise, as if at length she had been attractively assaulted enough; and they stood one by the other in satiety until Mr. Blumenthal arrived.

Mr. Blumenthal had a method of affecting Adelaide quite different from Monsieur Drang's, a tack that involved pity and condescension because of her beauty and wealth, follies her patronage of Monsieur Drang hardly seemed to condone in his eyes. His aim in life was to carry on the pre-eminence of his race, and to that end he absorbed the data Monsieur Drang selfishly gave him, so he could write reviews unmusical enough to appeal to rich, beautiful ladies like Adelaide, who would ask him to their houses and palaver over him in return. He was a stout greasy-looking young man, with the usual commonplace oriental gift of journalistic unrestraint, and with the assurance of a forty-five-yearold purser on the Fall River Line.

He greeted Adelaide condescendingly but congratulated her on having the most "intensive" house in America.

"If only the Great Sorrell were here to see and hear him to-night!" Adelaide gurgled, cheeks aflame, with a glance at her other guest which acknowledged the rightness of Mr. Blumenthal's congratulations. Adelaide really almost ex

ceeded their tone and their wildest hopes of her becoming such a radiant thread in the family web they wove. She might have been, as far as her being dans their mouvement went, the oboe suite itself throbbing between them, with all its blazon of Eastern rhythms and blare, to say nothing of Tahiti and the attractive assault upon her she thought its diatonic discords contained.

Opportunely Mr. Rosenburg arrived. His racial and personal line was just to take Adelaide matter-of-factly, keeping his knees from shaking as best he could, and to treat Monsieur Drang as if he and Adelaide had been brought up together. It wasn't much of a line, but he had hit on it as the only means within his power to cover his excitement over being in Adelaide's house himself and over Monsieur Drang's being there so predominatingly.

Adelaide liked him for his simplicity. Even Adelaide would have found it difficult to point out what else she saw in him, he had so few distinguishing marks besides his adenoids and insignificance, which latter was so extreme, though, as to amount perhaps to distinction. Yet he gave Mr. Blumenthal tidbits about arpeggios, and Mr. Blumenthal once wrote in a famous musical journal that he drew a better tone than any of the "past generations," which if Adelaide had known of it, would have been reason enough why she liked him.

He was telling Adelaide about one of his pupils having a stomach-ache, and how wearing and tearing it had made the afternoon for him, when Adelaide's poet with the receding forehead, Mr. Epstein, appeared in company with Mrs. Tenney, one of Tracey's abhorred frumps, who had picked him up and brought him in her taxi.

Mr. Epstein, more than anybody else present, convinced Adelaide that she was dans le mouvement. Mr. Epstein's poems had no rhymes, no meters, and no capital letters. What more could you ask of modernity than that? Indeed, Mr. Epstein wore no different garb in the evening