“Why, yes,” he answered.  “Out West upon the prairies we go in for comfort, and don’t mind so small a matter as shirt-sleeves on a sweltering August day.”

“Please do not use such expressions as sweltering and go in—­they do not sound well,” Ethelyn rejoined.  “And now I think of it, I wish you would talk more to the ladies in the parlor.  You hardly spoke to Mrs. Cameron last evening, and she directed most of her conversation to you, too.  I was afraid she would either think that you were rude, or else that you did not know what to say.”

“She hit it right, if she came to the latter conclusion,” Richard said, good-humoredly, “for the fact is, Ethie, I don’t know what to say to such women as she.  I am not a ladies’ man, and it’s no use trying to make me over.  You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”

Ethie fairly groaned as she clasped her bracelets upon her arms and shook down the folds of her blue silk; then after a moment she continued:  “You can talk to me, and why not to others?”

“You are my wife, Ethie, and I love you, which makes a heap of difference,” Richard said, and winding his arms around Ethie’s waist he drew her face toward his own and kissed it affectionately.

They had been three days at Saratoga when this little scene occurred and their room was one of those miserable little apartments in the Ainsworth block which look out upon nothing but a patch of weeds and the rear of a church.  Ethelyn did not like it at all, and liked it the less because she felt that to some extent her husband was to blame.  He ought to have written and engaged rooms beforehand—­Aunt Van Buren always did, and Mrs. Col.  Tophevie, and everybody who understood the ins and outs of fashionable life.  But Richard did not understand them.  He believed in taking what was offered to him without making a fuss, he said.  He had never been to Saratoga before, and he secretly hoped he should never come again, for he did not enjoy those close, hot rooms and worm-eaten furniture any better than Ethelyn did, but he accepted it with a better grace, saying, when he first entered it, that “he could put up with ’most anything, though to be sure it was hotter than an oven.”

His mode of expressing himself had never suited Ethelyn.  Particular, and even elegant in her choice of language, it grated upon her sensitive ear, and forgetting that she had all her life heard similar expressions in Chicopee, she charged it to the West, and Iowa was blamed for the faults of her son more than she deserved.  At Saratoga, where they met many of her acquaintances, all of whom were anxious to see the fastidious Ethelyn’s husband, it seemed to her that he was more remiss than ever in those little things which make up the finished gentleman, while his peculiar expressions sometimes made every nerve quiver with pain.  The consequence of this was that Ethelyn became a very little cross, as Richard thought, though she had never