In her dark-blue dress, with the row of silver buttons down what was hip before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the silhouette a mere stroke of a hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up and down to America’s Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the spine.  Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of collapse beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up half-way to her throat, hers were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the sweet-meat, would earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath.

When Miss Coblenz caught her eye in the square of mirror above the mantelpiece, her hands flew to her cheeks to feel of their redness.  They were soft cheeks, smooth with the pollen of youth, and hands still casing them, she moved another step toward the portiered door.

“Mama!”

Mrs. Coblenz emerged immediately, finger up for silence, kissing her daughter on the little spray of cheek-curls.

“’Shh-h-h!  Gramaw just had a terrible spell.”

She dropped down into the upholstered chair beside the base-burner, the pink and moisture of exertion out in her face, took to fanning herself with the end of a face-towel flung across her arm.

“Poor gramaw!” she said.  “Poor gramaw!”

Miss Coblenz sat down on the edge of a slim, home-gilded chair, and took to gathering the blue-silk dress into little plaits at her knee.

“Of course, if you don’t want to know where I’ve been—­or anything—­”

Mrs. Coblenz jerked herself to the moment.

“Did mama’s girl have a good time?  Look at your dress, all dusty!  You oughtn’t to wear your best in that little flivver.”

Suddenly Miss Coblenz raised her glance, her red mouth bunched, her eyes all iris.

“Of course—­if you don’t want to know—­anything.”

At that large, brilliant gaze, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, quickened.

“Why, Selene!”

“Well, why—­why don’t you ask me something?”

“Why, I—­I dunno, honey.  Did—­did you and Lester have a nice ride?”

There hung a slight pause, and then a swift moving and crumpling-up of Miss Coblenz on the floor beside her mother’s knee.

“You know—­only, you won’t ask.”

With her hand light upon her daughter’s hair, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, her bosom rising to faster breathing.

“Why—­Selene—­I—­Why—­”

“We—­we were speeding along, and—­all of a sudden, out of a clear sky, he—­he popped.  He wants it in June, so we can make it our honeymoon to his new territory out in Oklahoma.  He knew he was going to pop, he said, ever since that first night he saw me at the Y.M.H.A.  He says to his uncle Mark, the very next day in the store, he says to him, ‘Uncle Mark,’ he says, ‘I’ve met the little girl.’  He says he thinks more of my little finger than all of his regular crowd of girls in town put together.  He wants to live in one of the built-in-bed flats on Wasserman Avenue, like all the swell young marrieds.  He’s making twenty-six hundred now, mama, and if he makes good in the new Oklahoma territory, his Uncle Mark is—­is going to take care of him better.  Ain’t it like a dream, mama—­your little Selene all of a sudden in with—­the somebodies?”