"I knew it was something insulting," said Martha with an injured sniff.
The only concessions Martha would make to the latter-day craze of women for youthfulness were buying a foolish chin-strap of a beauty quack and consulting him as to whether, if her hair continued to gray, she would better take to peroxide or to henna.
Jane had come down that day with a severe lecture on fat and wrinkles laid out in her mind for energetic delivery to the fast-seeding Martha. She put off the lecture and allowed the time to be used by Martha in telling Jane what were her (Jane's) strongest and less strong—not weaker but less strong, points of physical charm.
It was cool and beautiful in the shade of the big gardens behind the old Galland house. Jane, listening to Martha's honest and just compliments and to the faint murmurs of the city's dusty, sweaty toil, had a delicious sense of the superiority of her lot—a feeling that somehow there must be something in the theory of rightfully superior and inferior classes—that in taking what she had not earned she was not robbing those who had earned it, as her reason so often asserted, but was being supported by the toil of others for high purposes of aesthetic beauty. Anyhow, why heat one's self wrestling with these problems?
When she was sure that Victor Dorn must have returned she called him on the telephone. "Can't you come out to see me to-night?" said she. "I've something important—something YOU'LL think important—to consult you about." She felt a refusal forming at the other end of the wire and hastened to add: "You must know I'd not ask this if I weren't certain you would be glad you came."
"Why not drop in here when you're down town?" suggested Victor.
She wondered why she did not hang up the receiver and forget him.
But she did not. She murmured, "In due time I'll punish you for this, sir," and said to him: "There are reasons why it's impossible for me to go there just now. And you know I can't meet you in a saloon or on a street corner."
"I'm not so sure of that," laughed he. "Let me see. I'm very busy. But I could come for half an hour this afternoon."
She had planned an evening session, being well aware of the favorable qualities of air and light after the matter-of-fact sun has withdrawn his last rays. But she promptly decided to accept what offered. "At three?"