“Please go home and come again at the proper time.  I am not ready to receive you now.”

I had a sudden whimsical vision of the faces of Dicky and the Underwoods if I should thus speak my real thoughts.  The thought in some curious fashion made it easier for me to cross the room to Lillian Gale’s side, extend my hand and say cordially: 

“How good of you to come this afternoon!”

“I know it is unpardonable,” Lillian’s high pitched voice answered.  “You invited us for the evening, not for the afternoon, but I told Harry that I was going to crucify the conventions and come over early, so I would have a chance to say more than two words to you before the rest get here.”

Harry Underwood elbowed his wife away from my side with a playful push, and held out his hand.  His brilliant, black eyes looked down into mine with the same lazy approving expression that I had resented when Dicky introduced me to him at the theatre.

I cudgelled my brain in vain for some airy nothing with which to answer his nonsense.  I never have had the gift of repartee.  I can talk well enough about subjects that interest me when I am conversing with some one whom I know well, but the frothy persiflage, the light banter that forms the conversation’s stock in trade of so many women, is an alien tongue to me.

“You are just as welcome as Mrs. Underwood is,” I said heartily at last.  Fortunately he did not read the precisely honest meaning hidden in my words.

“Come on, Harry, into my room,” urged Dicky, taking him by the arm.  “I’ve got a special brand cached in there, and had to hide it so mein frau wouldn’t drink it up.”

I suppose my face reflected the dismay I felt at this intimation that the women would begin drinking so early.  I feared for the repetition of the experience of Friday evening.  But the laws of conventions and hospitality bound me.  I felt that I could not protest.  Mrs. Underwood apparently had no such scruples.  She clutched Dicky by the arm and swung him around facing her.

“Now, see here, my Dicky-bird,” she began, “you begin this special bottle kind of business and I walk out of here.  I should think you and Harry would have had enough of this the other evening.  We came over here today for a little visit, and tonight we’ll sit on either the water wagon or the beer wagon, just as Mrs. Graham says.  But you boys won’t start any of these special drinks, or I’ll know the reason why.”

“Oh, cut it out, Lil,” her husband said, not crossly, but mechanically, as if it were a phrase he often used.  But Dicky laughed down at her, although I knew by the look in his eyes that he was much annoyed.

“All right, Lil,” he said easily.  “I suppose Madge will fall in gratitude on your neck for this when she gets you into the seclusion of her room.  You haven’t any objection to our having a teenty-weenty little smoke, have you, mamma dear?”

“Go as far as you like,” she returned, ignoring the sneers.