"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certain tremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, my daughter Louise."
Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminary gesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress with the hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant, was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and then returned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desired to give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined her mother on the steps.
"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise to Mrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but—er—uppish, what?"
"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharne had replied.
After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-lit down-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one of her mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions—the "salon" which at once provoked and amused Laura—which she attended; but she had exchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but there were some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; and she was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty with her neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.
"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" her mother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks. Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and one must take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet a few of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some of them, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you be down?"
It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharne made the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, even if it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depicted her mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had been waiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glance sharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's point of view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.
"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a—" Louise stumbled on the word "host."
But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.