as an organism.  Her dash and her prettiness sufficed to place her comfortably here, but beyond a speaking acquaintance with Gerty, who confessed that she was too charitable to be exclusive she had not as yet approached that small shining sphere whose inmates boast the larger freedom no less than the finer discrimination.  The larger freedom, it seemed at times, was all of it that she was ever to attain, for, venturing a little too boldly once or twice with a light head, she had at last found herself skating gingerly over a veritable sleet of scandal.  She got herself rumoured about so persistently that from being merely improbable, she had become, in Gerty’s words again, “one of the very last of the impossibilities.”  And of late Adams’ friends had begun to ask themselves quite seriously, “why in the deuce he didn’t keep a hand upon his wife.”  How much he knew or how much there was, in reality, to know had become in a limited circle almost the question of the hour, until Perry Bridewell had demanded in final exasperation “whether Adams was ridiculously ignorant or outrageously indifferent?”

But if the curious had been permitted to observe the object of their uncertainty as he stood under the full glare before his festive wife they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner.  He regarded her with a frank, fatherly tolerance, in which there was hardly a suggestion of a more passionate concern.

“Wrap up well,” he said, as his glance shot over her, “there’s a biting wind outside.”

Connie screwed up her delicate eyebrows and the fine little wrinkles leaped instantly into view.  There was a nervous irritation in her look, which recoiled from her husband as from a blank and shining wall.

“I’m dining at Sherry’s with the Donaldsons,” she explained.  “I knew you wouldn’t come, so I didn’t even trouble you to decline.”

“You’re right, my dear,” he rejoined gayly.

“Mr. Brady has called for me,” she went on with the faintest possible hesitation in her voice, “and as we’re all going to the theatre afterward I shall probably be late.  Don’t bother about sitting up for me—­I have a key.”

“Well, take care of yourself,” responded Adams pleasantly, adding to a young man who appeared in the drawing-room doorway, “How are you, Mr. Brady?  Please don’t let Mrs. Adams be so foolish as to stand outside in the wind.  I can’t make her take care of her cold.”

“Oh, I’ll promise to look out for it,” replied Brady, standing slightly behind Connie, and arranging by a careless movement the white fur on her cloak.  His handsome wooden features possessed hardly more character than was expressed by his immaculately starched shirt front, but he was not without a certain wholly superficial attraction, half as of a sleek, well-groomed animal and half as of a masculine conceit, naked and unashamed.

Connie tinkled out her nervous, high-pitched, vacant little laugh, which she used to fill in gaps in conversation much as a distinguished virtuoso might interlude his own important efforts with selections of light vocal strains.