“Nothing of the sort,” I said coldly, “and the fact that you didn’t marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends.  Anyhow, I don’t like you when you speak like that.”

Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.

“I haven’t been well,” he said heavily.  “Don’t eat, don’t sleep.  Wouldn’t you think I’d lose flesh?  Kit”—­he lowered his voice solemnly—­“I have gained two pounds!”

I said he didn’t look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was.  He said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry Reggie Wolfe.  Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.

That was my entire share in the affair.  I was the victim, both of circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.

During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them.  They asked me why I couldn’t cook—­when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other.  And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did—­saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming—­for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy.  Yes, there was an aunt.  The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it along.

Chapter II.  THE WAY IT BEGAN

It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that dinner a success.  I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had given me for Christmas.  Their chauffeur had been gone for hours with their machine, and they had telephoned all the police stations without success.  They were afraid that there had been an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie said, but it takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.

Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from the other houses to be entirely maddening later.  It was a three-story affair, with a basement kitchen and servants’ dining room.  Then, of course, there were cellars, as we found out afterward.  On the first floor there was a large square hall, a formal reception room, behind it a big living room that was also a library, then a den, and back of all a Georgian dining room, with windows high above the ground.  On the top floor Jim had a studio, like every other one I ever saw—­perhaps a little mussier.  Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there were cigarette ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields everywhere.  It is strange, but when I think of that terrible house, I always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy rugs, and stairs that would have taken six housemaids to keep in proper condition.  I dream about those stairs, stretching above me in a Jacob’s ladder of shining wood and Persian carpets, going up, up, clear to the roof.