"From camp to court, my boy, has ever been but a step, although sometimes it's a mighty long one," returned Fleming oratorically. "Now this is the way I've explained it to myself. You see, I've got that wild, free, above-timber-line flavor about me that simply locos the type of woman that keeps husband hobbled to a stake under the big tree by the back porch where she can keep an eye on him from the kitchen windows. Now, personally, the catnip and parsley kind of woman never did appeal to me; but these New York orchids are different. They know how to appreciate the Rocky Mountain edelweiss, and seem grateful to me for taking their husbands off their hands now and then. And they're so interested, too, in the little every-day incidents of an old prospector's life."
"You just ought to hear papa Othelloize those Ophelias," said Fuschia, deftly seizing the first opportunity to get into the conversation. "He'll tell them about being carried down a thousand feet in a mighty snowslide and escaping unhurt, and of the fabulous properties he's discovered, and of frequent encounters with enormous grizzlies, where he'll tap them lightly on the jaw and advise them to hasten home and then if they get too familiar, he gives them a twist of the wrist that sends them howling back to the woods."
"Fuschia," said her father sternly, "you talk entirely too much, and there's a day of reckoning coming for you. Just wait till you get to London. There you'll be sneaking in at the back door and eating a cold biscuit in the pantry while you're waiting to do a few recitations for the ladies and gentlemen; while I'll be sailing in to dinner with a belted earless on one arm and a tiaraed duchess on the other."
"I'm afraid I see your finish, Jim," sighed Hepworth. "You'll end as a leader of cotillions. Your head is badly turned."
"There's no denying, Hep, that we are apt to set and undue value on what we've never had, and these late-blooming feminine smiles are like a bottle of champagne in the desert."
"Oh, dear, here is the roast," cried Fuschia disconsolately, "and Cinderella must run away. Is there no hope of seeing Mrs. Hepworth this evening?" turning to Maud.
Maud hesitated a moment, then, "I really do not know," she confessed frankly, "she—she has not been particularly well all day." She simply could not plead for Perdita the conventional bad headache while Hepworth's steady eyes were fixed upon her.
Fuschia, who happened to be looking at him, saw a quick shade of disappointment pass over his face, and her impulsive sympathy was roused by the depth and poignancy of that immediately suppressed emotion. She threw herself into the breach.
"Oh, I want dreadfully to see her to-night about the gown I am to wear when I play the scheming adventuress next week. We were to have decided it to-night. She is thinking of putting me in green instead of the usual black with touches of scarlet, and the accustomed badge of the adventuress, high-heeled scarlet slippers. And I am so anxious to know if Mrs. Hepworth has decided upon green, a wonderful, wicked, dazzling green, with strange blue lights in the shadows. Oh, may I send a message and ask her to see me just a moment?"
But before Maud could answer, Perdita entered the room. She pleaded the usual headache, which Maud had so carefully avoided, and that threadbare social fiction was for once upheld and substantiated. Dita's appearance fully bore it out. Her face was pale, her eyes heavy. She promised, however, to give a full consideration to the question of Fuschia's green gown the next morning, and the actress who had already overstayed the limits of the time she had allotted herself prepared to take her departure.