Mrs. Treharne, dressed for a restaurant supper party that was to assemble at midnight, was reading, with the wistfulness of one debarred, the "society news" in a chattery and generally wrong weekly publication when Louise entered her sitting room. She was wonderfully coiffured, and encased in a décolletté dress that somewhat too liberately exploited the chisellings of her still milky arms and shoulders. She stiffened slightly in her chair at the sight of Louise; and the dimplings which had been creasing her plastic face in her enjoyment of the publication's malevolent gossip gave way to the expression of peevishness with which her daughter was becoming all too well acquainted.
"Well, my dear," she started to say as Louise, in whose eyes the embers of the wrath Jesse's words had aroused still slumbered, "I must say that you have a cool way of walking off and——"
"No reproaches just now, mother, please," interposed Louise, sinking wearily into a chair. "I never had a happier day until, returning here——"
She paused, passing a hand before her eyes. She was loth to enter upon the topic of Judd and Jesse with her mother. But Mrs. Treharne, looking at her more closely, saw her perturbation.
"Oh, you met Mr. Judd and Mr. Jesse as you came in?" she asked, a note of slightly worried curiosity in her tone. "Were they——?" She broke off. "Men are men, my dear," she resumed, placatingly. "They had been dining—I noticed that. But of course they said nothing to——"
"Your business adviser," said Louise—she could not bring herself to mention Judd's name—"greeted me as 'daughter.' I remember now that I was too much startled to tell him that he must not repeat that."
"Tush, Louise—a slip of the tongue, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, appeasingly. Privately, however, she already began to contrive the things she intended to say to Judd on the morrow. "And Mr. Jesse—did he——"
"Mr. Jesse," interposed Louise, "caught himself as he was about to address me as Louise. He offered me the use of his box at the opera. Several days ago—I was too chagrined to tell you—he insisted upon my accepting the use of one of his automobiles. I hope I made it plain to him tonight—and I tried hard enough to make it plain to him before—that there is not the remotest chance that I shall ever accept his sinister civilities."
"Why 'sinister,' Louise?" put Mrs. Treharne, bridling. "How can you possibly put such a construction upon it when one of my friends generously extends to you courtesies that are commonly and with perfect propriety accepted by——"