“Oh, yes, indeed, Ann!” pursued Miss Ives with morose enjoyment.  “You don’t know how helpless one is.  I’ll be annoyed to death for the rest of the month, just so that the Dancing Girl can go back to the city this winter and say, ’Oh, girls, Julia Ives was staying where mamma and I were this summer, and she’s just a dear!  She doesn’t make up one bit off the stage, and she dresses just as plain!  I saw her every day and got some dandy snapshots.  She’s just a darling when you know her.’”

“Well!  What an unspoiled modest little soul you are, Julie!” interrupted the doctor’s admiring voice.  He wheeled away the umbrella and, lying luxuriously on his elbows in the sun, beamed at them both through his glasses.

“Jim,” said the actress, severely, “it’s positively indecent—­the habit you’re getting of evesdropping on Ann and me!”

“It gives me sidelights on your characters,” said the doctor, quite brazenly.

“Ann—­don’t you call that disgraceful?”

“I certainly do, Ju,” his wife agreed warmly.  “But Jim has no sense of honor.”  Ann Arbuthnot, in the fifteen years of her married life, had never been able to keep a thrill of adoration out of her voice when she spoke, however jestingly, of her husband.  It trembled there now.

“Well, what’s wrong, Julie?  Some old admirer turn up?” asked the doctor, sleepily content to follow any conversational lead, in the idle pleasantness of the hour.

“No—­no!” she corrected him, “just some silly social complications ahead—­which I hate!”

“Be rude,” suggested the doctor, pleasantly.

“Now, you know, I’d love that!” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, youthfully.  “I’d simply love to be followed and envied and adored!”

“No, you wouldn’t, Ann!” Miss Ives assured her promptly.  “You’d like it, as I did, for a little while.  And then the utter uselessness of it would strike you.  Especially from such little complacent, fluffy whirlings as that Dancing Girl!”

“Yes, and that’s the kind of a girl I like,” persisted the other, smiling.

“That’s the kind of a girl you were, Ann, I’ve no doubt,” said the actress, vivaciously, “only sweeter.  I know she wore white ruffles and a velvet band on her hair, didn’t she, Jim?  And roses in her belt?”

“She did,” said the doctor, reminiscently.  “I believe she flirted in her kindergarten days.  She was always engaged to ride or dance or row on the river with the other men—­and always splitting her dances, and forgetting her promises, and wearing the rings and pins of her adorers.”

“And the fun was, Ju,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, girlishly, with bright color in her cheeks, “that when Jim came there to give two lectures, you know, all the older girls were crazy about him—­and he was ten years older than I, you know, and I never dreamed—­”

“Oh, you go to, Ann!  You never dreamed!” said Miss Ives, lazily.