“It’s a good business,” said Cousin Patty, “and I can do it at home.  I couldn’t have gone out in the world to make my fight for a living.  I can defy men in theory; but I’m really Southern and feminine—­if you know what that means,” she laughed happily.  “Of course I never let them know it, not even Roger.”

And now Mary came in, lovely in her white dinner gown.

“Oh,” she accused them, “you aren’t ready.”

Cousin Patty rose.  “I wanted to know what to wear, and we’ve talked an hour, and haven’t said a word about it.”

“Don’t bother,” Mary said; “there’ll be just four of us.”

“But I want to bother.  Roger helped me to plan my things.  He remembered every single dress you wore while he was here.”

“Really?” The look which Roger had loved was creeping into Mary’s clear eyes.  “Really, Cousin Patty?”

“Yes.  He drew a sketch of your velvet wrap with the fur, and I made mine like it, only I put a frill in place of the fur.”  She trotted into her room and brought it back for Mary’s inspection.  “Is it all right?” she asked, anxiously, as she slipped it on, and craned her neck in front of Aunt Isabelle’s long mirror to see the sweep of the folds.

“It is perfect; and to think he should remember.”

Cousin Patty gave her a swift glance.  “That isn’t all he has remembered,” she said, succinctly.

It developed when they went down for dinner that Roger had ordered a box of flowers for them—­purple violets for Aunt Isabelle and Cousin Patty, white violets for Mary.

“How lovely,” Mary said, bending over the box of sweetness.  “I am perfectly sure no one ever sent me white violets before.”

There were other flowers—­orchids from Porter.

“And now—­which will you wear?” demanded sprightly Cousin Patty, an undercurrent of anxiety in her tone.

Mary wore the violets, and Porter gloomed all through the play.

“So my orchids weren’t good enough,” he said, as she sat beside him on their way to the hotel where they were to have supper.

“They were lovely, Porter.”

“But you liked the violets better?  Who sent them, Mary?”

“Don’t ask in that tone.”

“You don’t want to tell me.”

“It isn’t that—­it’s your manner.”  She broke off to say pleadingly, “Don’t let us quarrel over it.  Let me forget for to-night that there’s any discord in the world—­any work—­any worry.  Let me be Contrary Mary—­happy, care-free, until it all begins over again in the morning.”

Very softly she said it, and there were tears in her voice.  He glanced down at her in surprise.  “Is that the way life looks to you—­you poor little thing?”

“Yes, and when you are cross, you make it harder.”

Thus, woman-like, she put him in the wrong, and the question of violets vs. orchids was shelved.

Presently, in the great red dining-room, Porter was ordering things for Cousin Patty’s delectation of which she had never heard.  Her enjoyment of the novelty of it all was refreshing.  She tasted and ate and looked about her as frankly as a happy child, yet never, with it all, lost her little air of serene dignity, which set her apart from the flaming, flaring type of femininity which abounds in such places.