was no doubt about that; still, he would have liked to be less hasty in her expenditures.  He had been too long in business to count much on prospects.  He disliked borrowing more money from Brauer, but there was no alternative.  Brauer fell to grumbling quite audibly over these advances, and he saw to it that Fred’s notes for the amounts always were forthcoming.  Hilmer did not come in quite so often to the office; a rush of shipbuilding construction took him over to his yards in Oakland nearly every day.  But Mrs. Hilmer was in evidence a good deal.  Helen was constantly calling her up and asking her to drop downtown for luncheon or for a bit of noonday shopping uptown or just for a talk.

“She’s a dear!” Helen used to say to Fred.  “And I just love her to death...”

Fred could not fathom Helen.  A year ago he felt sure that Mrs. Hilmer was the last woman in the world that Helen would have found bearable, much less attractive...  He concluded that Helen was enjoying the novelty of watching Mrs. Hilmer nibble at a discreet feminine frivolity to which she was unaccustomed.  After a while he looked for outward changes in Mrs. Hilmer’s make-up.  He figured that the shopping tours with Helen might be reflected in a sprightlier bonnet or a narrower skirt or a higher heel on her shoe.  But no such transformation took place.  Indeed, her costuming seemed to grow more and more uncompromising—­more Dutch, to use the time-worn phrase, made significant to Fred Starratt by his mother.  But Helen always made a point to compliment her on her appearance.

“You look too sweet for anything!” Helen would exclaim, rushing upon her new friend with an eager kiss.

At this Mrs. Hilmer always dimpled with wholesome pleasure.  Well, she did look sweet, in a motherly, bovine way, Fred admitted, when the note of insincerity in his wife’s voice jarred him.

One day Mrs. Hilmer brought down a hat the two had picked out and which had been altered at Helen’s suggestion.  She tried it on for Helen’s approval, and Fred stood back in a corner while Helen went into ecstasies over it.  Even a man could not escape the fact that it was unbecoming.  Somehow, in a subtle way, it seemed to accent all of Mrs. Hilmer’s unprepossessing features.  When she left the office Fred said to Helen, casually: 

“I don’t think much of your taste, old girl.  That hat was awful!”

Helen laughed maliciously.  “Of course it was!” she flung back.

Starratt shrugged and said no more.  There was kindliness back of many deceits, but he knew now that Helen’s insincerities with Mrs. Hilmer were not justified by even so dubious virtue.

At the moment when the Hilmer shipyard insurance had been turned over to Fred Starratt he had at once made a move toward a reduction in the rate.  Having gone over the schedule at the Board of Fire Underwriters, he had discovered that they had failed to give Hilmer credit in the rating for certain fire protection.  On the strength of Starratt’s application for a change a new rate was published about the middle of May.  Starratt was jubilant.  Here was proof for Hilmer that his interests were being guarded and that it paid to employ an efficient broker.  He flew at once to Hilmer’s office.