Mrs. Baker, a big wholesome woman, who looked, Martie thought, as if she might have a delicate daughter, married young, and a husband prominent in the Eastern Star, and be herself a clever bridge player, and a most successful hostess and guest at women’s hilarious lunch-eons, looked at the stranger truculently.  She was a tightly corseted woman, with prominent teeth, and a good-natured smile.  Martie felt sure that she always had good clothes, and wore white shoes in summer, and could be generous without any glimmering of a sense of justice.  She was close to fifty.

“How do, Mrs. Bannister,” she said heartily.  “I’ve heard Adele mention your name.  How do you think she looks?  I think she looks like death.  How do, dear?” she added to Teddy.  “Are you mama’s boy?  I don’t live in New York like you do; I live in Browning, Indiana.  Don’t you think that’s a funny place to live?  But it’s a real pretty place just the same.”

“Have you had your lunch?” Adele was asking.  “We haven’t.  I was kept by the girl at the milliner’s—­”

It was one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.  Martie was free to lunch where she pleased.  She was free even to sit down with a woman whose name was under a cloud.  They all crowded into an express elevator, and sat down at a table in the restaurant on the twelfth floor.

Presently the unreality of it faded from Martie’s uppermost consciousness and she began to enjoy herself.  To sit with the wife of a Mystic Shriner, and the woman who had done what Adele had done, and whose husband incidentally was deeply devoted to herself, was not according to Monroe.  But she was in New York!

“I guess I was a silly girl, misled by a man of the world,” Adele was saying in her old, complaining, complacent voice.  “I know I was a fool, Martie, but don’t men do that sort of thing all the time, and get over it?  Why should us women pay all the time?  You know as well as I do that John Dryden was just as queer as Dick’s hatband; I was hungering, as a girl will, for pleasure and excitement—­”

“It was a dirty crime, the way that doctor acted,” Mrs. Baker contributed, her tone much pleasanter than her words.  “He must have been a skunk, if you ask me.  Adele here was wrong, Mrs. Bannister; you and I won’t quarrel about that.  But Adele wasn’t nothing but a child at heart—­”

“I believed anything he told me!” Adele drawled, playing with her knife and fork, her lashes dropped.

“Dryden,” the loyal sister continued majestically, “threw her over the second he got a chance; that’s what she got for putting up with him for all those years!  And then, if you please, this other feller discovers that he can’t get rid of his wife.  I came on then,” she said warmly as Martie murmured her sympathy, “and I says to Adele, throw the whole crowd of them down.  Billy Baker and I have plenty, and my daughter—­Ruby, she’s a lovely girl and she’s married an elegant feller whose people own about all the lumber interests in our part of the country—­she doesn’t need anything from us.  But if you ask me, it’s just about killed Adele,” she went on frankly, glancing at her sister, “she looks like a sick girl to me.  We came on two or three days ago, to see a specialist about her, and I declare I’ll be glad to get her back.”