However, the dinner was perfect.  Course smoothly followed course; there was no hesitating, no hitch; the service was swift, noiseless, unobtrusive.  The head of the house was obviously delighted, and the guests enthusiastic.

Best of all, Owen arrived early, irreproachably dressed, if a little uncomfortable in his evening clothes, and confided to Sandy that he had had a “rotten time” with Miss Satterlee.

“But she’s just the sort of little cat that catches a dear, great big idiot like Owen,” said Sandy to her mother, when the older woman had come in to watch the younger slip into her gown for the evening’s affair.

“Look out, dear, or I will begin to suspect you of a tendresse in that direction!” the mother said archly.

“For Owen?” Sandy raised surprised brows.  “I’m mad about him, I’d marry him to-night!” she went on calmly.

“If you really cared, dear, you couldn’t use that tone,” her mother said uncomfortably.  “Love comes only once, real love, that is—­”

“Oh, Mother!  There’s no such thing as real love,” Sandy said impatiently.  “I know ten good, nice men I would marry, and I’ll bet you did, too, years ago, only you weren’t brought up to admit it!  But I like Owen best, and it makes me sick to see a person like Rose Satterlee annexing him.  She’ll make him utterly wretched; she’s that sort.  Whereas I am really decent, don’t you know; I’d be the sort of wife he’d go crazier and crazier about.  He’s one of those unfortunate men who really don’t know what they want until they get something they don’t want.  They—­”

“Don’t, dear.  It distresses me to hear you talk this way,” Mrs. Salisbury said, with dignity.  “I don’t know whether modern girls realize how dreadful they are,” she went on, “but at least I needn’t have my own daughter show such a lack of—­of delicacy and of refinement.”  And in the dead silence that followed she cast about for some effective way of changing the subject, and finally decided to tell Sandy what she thought of Justine.

But here, too, Sandy was unsympathetic.  Scowling as she hooked the filmy pink and silver of her evening gown, Sandy took up Justine’s defense.

“All up to me, Mother, every bit of it!  And, honestly now, you had no right to ask her to do—­”

“No right!” Exasperated beyond all words, Mrs. Salisbury picked up her fan, gathered her dragging skirts together, and made a dignified departure from the room.  “No right!” she echoed, more in pity than anger.  “Well, really, I wonder sometimes what we are coming to!  No right to ask my servant, whom I pay thirty-seven and a half dollars a month, to stop writing letters long enough to clean my sitting room!  Well, right or wrong, we’ll see!”

But the cryptic threat contained in the last words was never carried out.  The dinner was perfect, and Owen was back in his old position as something between a brother and a lover, full of admiring great laughs for Sandy and boyish confidences.  There was not a cloud on the evening for Mrs. Salisbury.  And the question of Justine’s conduct was laid on the shelf.