“It does seem rather a shame,” she confided to a select friend or two, “that clever men who have escaped the perils of early matrimony should in maturity turn back to the very thing which constituted that peril.”

“You mean men like them young?” said a select friend with brutal candor.

“I mean they like them too young.  In the case I’m thinking of, the girl is a mere child.  And quite uncultured.  What possibility of intellectual companionship could the most sanguine man expect?”

“None.  But they don’t want intellectual companionship.”  Another select friend spoke bitterly.  “I used to think they did.  It seemed reasonable.  As the basis for a whole lifetime, it seemed the only possible thing.  But what’s the use of insisting on a theory, no matter how abstractly sound, if it is disproved in practice every day?  Remember Bobby Wells?  He is quite famous now; knows more about biology than any man on this side of the water.  He married last week.  His wife is a pretty little creature who thinks protoplasm another name for appendicitis.”

There was a sympathetic pause.

“And biology was always such a fad of yours,” sighed Mary thoughtfully.  “Never mind!  They are sure to be frightfully unhappy.”

“No, they won’t.  That’s it.  That’s the point I am making.  They’ll be as cozy as possible.”

Miss Davis thought this point over after the select friend who made it had gone.  She did not wish to believe that its implication was a true one.  But, if it were, if youth, just youth, were the thing of power, then it were wise that she should realize it before it was too late.  Her own share of the magic thing was swiftly passing.

From a drawer of her desk she took a recent letter from a Bainbridge correspondent and re-read the part referring to the Spence reception.

“Really, it was quite well done,” she read.  “Old Miss Campion has a ‘flair’ for the suitabilities, and now that so many are trying to be smart or bizarre, it is a relief to come back to the old pleasant suitable things—­you know what I mean.  And the old lady has an air.  How she gets it, I don’t know, for the dear Queen is her idea of style.  Perhaps there is something in the ‘aura’ theory.  If so, Miss Campion’s aura is the very glass of fashion.

“And the bride!  But I hear you are coming down, so you will see the bride for yourself.  There was a silly rumor about her being part Indian.  Well, if Indian blood can give one a skin like hers, I could do with an off-side ancestor myself!  She is even younger than report predicted.  But not sweet or coy (Heavens, how one wearies of that type!) And Benis Spence, as a bride-groom, has lost something of his ‘moony’ air.  He is quite attractive in an odd way.  All the same, I can’t help feeling (and others agree with me) that there is something odd about that marriage.  My dear, they do not act like married people.  The girl is as cool as a princess (I suppose princesses are).  And the professor’s attitude is so—­so casual.  Even John Rogers’ manner to the bride is more marked than the bridegroom’s.  But you know I never repeat gossip.  It isn’t kind.  And any-way it may not be true that he drops in for tea nearly every day.”