“You’ve got a fever, Clarence,” she announced quietly.  The answer was only a furious and incoherent burst of denunciation; the patient was in utter physical discomfort, and could not choose his terms.  Rachael—­not for the first nor the hundredth time—­felt within her an impulse to leave him here, leave him to outwear his miseries without her help.  But this she could not do without throwing the house into an uproar.  Clarence at these times had no consideration for public opinion, had no dignity, no self-control.  Much better satisfy him, as she had done so many times before, and keep a brave face to the world.

So she placed a hot-water bag against his cold feet, went to her own room adjoining to borrow a fluffy satin comforter with which to augment his own bed covering, laid an icy towel upon his throbbing forehead, and when Alfred presently appeared with a decanter of whisky, Rachael watched her husband eagerly gulp down a glass of it without uttering one word of the bitter protest that rose to her lips.

She was not a prude, with the sublime inconsistency of most women whose lives are made the darker for drink; she did not identify herself with any movement toward prohibition, or refuse the cocktails, the claret, and the wine that were customarily served at her own and at other people’s dinner-tables.  But she hated coarseness in any form, she hated contact with the sodden, self-pitying, ugly animal that Clarence Breckenridge became under the influence of drink.

To-night, when he presently fell asleep, somewhat more comfortable in body, and soothed in spirit by the promise of a visit from the doctor, Rachael went into her own room and sinking into a deep chair sat staring stupidly at the floor.  She did not think of the husband she had just left, nor of the formal dinner party being given, only half a mile away, to a great English novelist—­a dinner to which the Breckenridges had of course been asked and upon which Rachael had weeks ago set her heart.  She was tired, and her thoughts floated lazily about nothing at all, or into some opaque region of their own knowing, where the ills of the body might not follow.

Presently Miss Vanderwall, clothed in a trailing robe of soft Arabian cotton, came briskly out of the bathroom, her short dark hair hanging in a mane about her rosy face.

“Why so pensive, Rachael?” she asked cheerfully, pressing a button that lighted the circle of globes about the dressing-table mirror, and seating herself before it.  But under her loose locks she sent a keen and concerned look at her hostess’ thoughtful face.

“Tired,” Rachael answered briefly, not changing her attitude, but with a fleeting shadow of a smile.

“How’s Clancy?”

“Asleep.  He’s wretched, poor fellow!  Berry Stokes’ bachelor dinner, you know.  That crowd is bad for him.”

“I knew it must have been an orgy!” Miss Vanderwall declared vivaciously.  “That was a silly slip of mine in the car.  Billy doesn’t know he went, I suppose?”