The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath of cold and bracing air into her mother’s room.  “Yes,” she said, before Mrs. Vertrees could speak, “he brought me home!”

She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.

“Mamma!” Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold.  “Why don’t you ask me?”

This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable.  “I don’t—­” she faltered.  “Ask you what, Mary?”

“How I got along and what he’s like.”

“Mary!”

“Oh, it isn’t distressing!” said Mary.  “And I got along so fast—­” She broke off to laugh; continuing then, “But that’s the way I went at it, of course.  We are in a hurry, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head plaintively.

“Yes,” said Mary, “I’m going out in his car with him to-morrow afternoon, and to the theater the next night—­but I stopped it there.  You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them while you pretend to run away!”

“My dear, I don’t know what to—­”

“What to make of anything!” Mary finished for her.  “So that’s all right!  Now I’ll tell you all about it.  It was gorgeous and deafening and tee-total.  We could have lived a year on it.  I’m not good at figures, but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could manage at least twice as long on the cost of the ‘house-warming.’  I think the orchids alone would have lasted us a couple of months.  There they were, before me, but I couldn’t steal ’em and sell ’em, and so—­well, so I did what I could!”

She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother.  “It seemed to be a success—­what I could,” she said, clasping her hands behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic accompaniment to her narrative.  “The girl Edith and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things on me.  The father’s worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it.  He’s what he is.  I like him.”  She paused reflectively, continuing, “Edith’s ‘interested’ in that Lamhorn boy; he’s good-looking and not stupid, but I think he’s—­” She interrupted herself with a cheery outcry:  “Oh!  I mustn’t be calling him names!  If he’s trying to make Edith like him, I ought to respect him as a colleague.”

“I don’t understand a thing you’re talking about,” Mrs. Vertrees complained.

“All the better!  Well, he’s a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody’s always known that, but the Sheridans don’t know the everybodies that know.  He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan.  She’s like those people you wondered about at the theater, the last time we went—­dressed in ball-gowns; bound to show their clothes and jewels SOMEwhere!  She flatters the father, and so did I, for that matter—­ but not that way.  I treated him outrageously!”