He met the question with an admiring chuckle.  “Do you really mean you think he’s been abroad with her all this time?”

“Well, what else did he get his divorce for?” she demanded, with the utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be her most effective pose.

Perry’s chuckle swelled suddenly into a roar.  “Good Lord, how women talk!” he burst out.  “Why, Arnold has been divorced ten years and he never laid eyes on Jennie Alta till she sang over here three years ago.  There was nothing in it except that he liked to be seen with a celebrity—­most men do.  But, my dear girl,” he concluded in a kind of awful reverence, “what a tongue you’ve got.  It’s a jolly good thing for me that I’m your husband or you wouldn’t leave me a blessed patch of reputation to my back.”

His humor held him convulsed for several minutes, during which interval Gerty continued to regard him with her piquant cynicism.

“Well, if it wasn’t Madame Alta it was somebody who is voiceless,” she retorted coolly.  “I merely meant that there must have been a reason.”

“Oh, your ’reasons’!” ejaculated Perry.  Then he stooped and gave the letter lying on Gerty’s pillow a filip from his large pink forefinger.  “You haven’t told me what you think of this?” he said.

Picking up the letter Gerty unfolded it and read it slowly through from start to finish, the little ripple of sceptical amusement crossing and recrossing her parted lips,

     Ravens Nest,
     Fauquier County, Virginia,
     December 26, 19—.

My Dear Perry:  Nobody, of course, ever accused you of being literary, nor, thank Heaven, have I fallen under that aspersion—­but since the shortest road to success seems to be by circumvention, it has occurred to me that you might give a social shove or two to the chap who will hand you this letter sometime after the New Year.

His name is St. George Trent, he was born a little way up the turnpike from me, has an enchanting mother, and shows symptoms of being already inoculated with the literary plague.  I never read books, so I have no sense of comparative values in literature, and consequently can’t tell whether he is an inglorious Shakespeare or a subject for the daily press.  His mother assures me that he has already written a play worthy to stand beside Hamlet—­but, though she is a charming lady, I’m hardly convinced by her opinion.  The fact remains, however, that he is going to New York to become a playwright, and that he has two idols in the market place which, I fancy, you may be predestined to see demolished.  He is simply off his head to meet Roger Adams, the editor of The—­something or other I never heard of—­and—­remember your budding days and be charitable—­a lady who writes poems and signs herself Laura Wilde.  I prepared him for the inevitable catastrophe by assuring him that the harmless Mr. Adams eats