She was just established in her comfortable causeuse, when the door-bell heralded a visitor.
"My dear Mr. Wyllys!" she cried, fluttering forward to meet him. "You are doubly welcome when you come alone. One sees you so seldom except in a crowd, that it is a genuine pleasure to have a few moments' quiet conversation with you."
"It is like yourself to excuse my unfashionably early call with such gracious tact," responded the gentleman, bowing low over her hand.
He shook hands with the doctor with less empressement, but most respectfully, and sank upon a divan near the hostess.
"I have another engagement this evening, but I could not deny myself the pleasure of paying my devoirs to you in passing. I will not ask if you have recovered from the fatigue of Thursday night"—with an expressive look at her blooming face. "I believe, however, it is never a weariness to you to be agreeable, as it is to us duller and less benevolent mortals. I am horribly cross, always, on the morning succeeding a party. It is as if I had overdrawn my account, in the matter of social entertainment; borrowed too heavily from the reserve fund intended by Nature for daily expenses. But this rule applies only to people whose resources of spirits, wit, and general powers of pleasing, are limited. You are above the need of such pitiful economy as we find necessary."
"Shall I undeceive you?" beamed the lady. "If the doctor—dear, patient martyr!—were put into the witness-box, he might tell sad tales, make divulgations that would demolish your pretty and flattering theory. Doctor, my love! Mr. Wyllys is anxious to know what was the status of my spiritual and mental thermometer, on the morning after our little re-union, last week?"
"Eh, what did you say, my dear?"
He lowered his folio. His eyebrows were perked discontentedly, and his forefinger was in the doomed bow she had tied not fifteen minutes before.
Mrs. Baxter tried, unsuccessfully, to frown down the offending digit before she made reply.
"Mr. Wyllys has heard that I am like champagne, 'stale, flat, and unprofitable'—with a dash of vinegar—when the effervescence wrought by social excitement is off," vivified, by her mirthful misrepresentation of her visitor's words, into radiance that revealed every molar, and forced her eyelids into utter retirement.