mode—­a mode which was startling, yet becoming, and she clasped around her throat the Tiffany necklace, and as a crowning touch, put on long white gloves.  When she appeared upon the verandah where Margaret sat dressed in a pretty lingerie gown with Wilbur in a light grey business suit, the silence could be heard.  Then there was one double gasp of admiration from Maida and Adelaide in their white frocks and blue ribbons.  They looked at the visitor with positive adoration, but she flushed hotly.  She was a very quick-witted girl.  Margaret recovered herself, presented Wilbur, and shortly, they went in to dinner, but it was a ghastly meal.  Martha Wallingford in her unsuitable splendour was frankly, as she put it afterward, “hopping mad,” and Wilbur was unhappy and Margaret aghast, although apparently quite cool.  There was not a guest besides Martha.  The dinner was simple.  Afterward it seemed too farcical to ask a guest attired like a young princess to go out on the verandah and lounge in a wicker chair, while Wilbur smoked.  Then Annie Eustace appeared and Margaret was grateful.  “Dear Annie,” she said, after she had introduced the two girls, “I am so glad you came over.  Come in.”

“It is pleasanter on the verandah, isn’t it?” began Annie, then she caught Margaret’s expressive glance at the magnificent white silk.  They all sat stiffly in Margaret’s pretty drawing-room.  Martha said she didn’t play bridge and upon Annie’s timid suggestion of pinocle, said she had never heard of it.  Wilbur dared not smoke.  All that wretched evening they sat there.  The situation was too much for Margaret, that past mistress of situations, and her husband was conscious of a sensation approaching terror and also wrath whenever he glanced at the figure in sumptuous white, the figure expressing sulkiness in every feature and motion.  Margaret was unmistakably sulky as the evening wore on and nobody came except this other girl of whom she took no notice at all.  She saw that she was pretty, her hair badly arranged and she was ill-dressed, and that was enough for her.  She felt it to be an insult that these people had invited her and asked nobody to meet her, Martha Wallingford, whose name was in all the papers, attired in this wonderful white gown.  When Annie Eustace arose to go, she arose too with a peremptory motion.

“I rather guess I will go to bed,” said Martha Wallingford.

“You must be weary,” said Margaret.

“I am not tired,” said Martha Wallingford, “but it seems to me as dull here as in South Mordan, Illinois.  I might as well go to bed and to sleep as sit here any longer.”

When Margaret had returned from the guest room, her husband looked at her almost in a bewildered fashion.  Margaret sank wearily into a chair.  “Isn’t she impossible?” she whispered.

“Did she think there was a dinner party?” Wilbur inquired perplexedly.

“I don’t know.  It was ghastly.  I did not for a moment suppose she would dress for a party, unless I told her, and it is Emma’s night off and I could not ask people with only Clara to cook and wait.”