“Some of that comes to me, Wallie.  I have the rent coming this week!”

“Sure.  Take all you want, old girl.  You’re tired, aren’t you?”

“Tired and cold.”  Martie’s circulation was not good now, and she knew why.  Her meals had lost their interest, and sometimes even Teddy’s claims were neglected.  She was sleepy, tired, heavy all the time.  “When I see a spoon lying on the dining-room floor, and realize that it will lie there until I pick it up I could scream!” she told Wallace.

“It’s a shame, poor old girl!”

“Oh, no—­it’s all right.”  She would blink back the tears.  “I’m not sorry!”

But she was sorry and afraid.  She resented Wallace’s easy sympathy, resented the doctor’s advice to rest, not to worry, his mild observation that a good deal of discomfort was inevitable.

Early in the new year she began to agitate the question of a dinner to the Drydens.  Wallace, who had taken a fancy to Adele, agreed lazily to endure John’s company, which he did not enjoy, for one evening.  But he obstinately overruled Martie on the subject of a dinner at home.

“Nix,” said Wallace flatly.  “I won’t have my wife cooking for anybody!”

“But Wallace—­just grape-fruit and broilers and a salad!  And they’ll come out and help cook it.  You don’t know how informally we did things at Grandma’s!”

“Well, you’re not doing things informally now.  It would be different if you had a couple of servants!”

“But it may be years before we have a couple of servants.  Aren’t we ever going to entertain, until then?”

“I don’t know anything about that.  But I tell you I won’t have them thinking that we’re hard up.  I’ll take them to a restaurant somewhere, and show that little boob a square meal!”

He finally selected an oppressively magnificent restaurant where a dollar-and-a-half table-d’hote dinner was served.

“But I’d like to blow them to a real dinner!” he regretted.

“Oh, Wallace, I’m not trying to impress them!  We’ll have more than enough to eat, and music, and a talk.  Then we can break up at about ten, and we’ll have done the decent thing!”

The four were to meet at half-past six, but both Adele and Wallace were late, and John and Martie had half an hour’s talk while they waited.  Martie fairly bubbled in her joy at the chance to speak of books and poems, ideals and reforms again.  She told him frankly and happily that she had missed him; she had wanted to see him so many times!  And he looked tired; he had had grippe?

“Always motherly!” he said, a smile on the strange mouth, but no corresponding smile in the faunlike eyes.

Wallace arrived in a bad mood, as Martie instantly perceived.  But Adele, radiant in a new hat, was prettily concerned for his cold and fatigue, and they were quickly escorted to a table near the fountain, and supplied with cocktails.  Cheered, Wallace demanded the bill-of-fare, “the table-d’hote, Handsome!” said he to the appreciative waiter.