Romantic Passion

Psychic Austerity

Tragedy

Ambition

Poignancy

Innocence

And Irritation

cannot be housed together for even one Rainy Week without producing drama!

But whether that drama be farce or fury—? Whether he who came to star remains to supe? Who yet shall prove the hero? And who the villain! Who—? Oh, la! It's God's business now!

"All the more reason," affirms my Husband, "why all such details as light and color effects, eatments, drinkments and guest-room reading matter should be attended to with extra conscientiousness."

Already through a somewhat sensational motor collision in the gay October Berkshires we had acquired the tentative Bride and Groom, Paul Brenswick and Victoria Meredith, as ardent and unreasonable a pair of young lovers as ever rose unscathed from a shivered racing car to face, instead of annihilation, a mere casual separation of months until such May-time as Paul himself, returning from Heaven knows what errand in China, should mate with her and meet with us.

And to New York City, of course, one would turn instinctively for the Someone With a Future. At a single round of studio parties in the brief Thanksgiving Holiday we found Claude Kennilworth. Not a moment's dissension occurred between us concerning his absolute fitness for the part. He was beautiful to look at, and not too young, twenty-five perhaps, the approximate age of our tentative Bride and Groom. And he made things with his hands in dough, clay, plaster, anything he could reach very insolently, all the time you were talking to him, modeling the thing he was thinking about, instead!

"Oh, just wait till you see him in bronze?" thrilled all the young Satellites around him.

"Till you see me in bronze!" thrilled young Kennilworth himself.

Never in all my life have I beheld anyone as beautiful as Claude Kennilworth—with a bit of brag in him! That head sharply uplifted, the pony-like forelock swished like smoke across his flaming eyes, the sudden wild pulse of his throat. Heavens! What a boy!

"You artist-fellows are forever reproducing solids with liquids," remarked my Husband quite casually. "All the effects I mean! All the illusion! Crag or cathedral out of a dime-sized mud-puddle in your water-color box! Flesh you could kiss from a splash of turpentine! But can you reproduce liquids with solids? Could you put the ocean into bronze, I mean?"

"The ocean?" screamed the Satellites.

"No mere skinny bas-relief," mused my Husband, "of the front of a wave hitched to the front of a wharf or the front of a beach but waves corporeally complete and all alone— shoreless—skyless—like the model of a village an ocean rolling all alone as it were in the bulk of its three dimensions?"

"In—bronze?" questions young Kennilworth. "Bronze?" His voice was very faintly raspish.

"Oh, it wasn't a blue ocean especially that I was thinking about," confided my Husband, genially, through the mist of his cigarette. "Any chance pick-up acquaintance has seen the ocean when it's blue. But my wife and I, you understand, we live with the ocean! Call it by its first name,—'Oh Ocean!' —and all that sort of thing!" he smiled out abruptly above the sudden sharp spurt of a freshly-struck match. "The—the ocean I was thinking of," he resumed with an almost exaggerated monotone, "was a brown ocean—brown as boiled sea-weeds—mad as mud under a leaden sky—seething—souring—perfectly lusterless—every brown billow-top pinched-up as though by some malevolent hand into a vivid verdigris bruise——"

"But however in the world would one know where to begin?" giggled the Satellites. "Or how to break it off so it wouldn't end like the edge of a tin roof! Even if you started all right with a nice molten wave? What about the—last wave? The problem of the horizon sense? Yes! What about the horizon sense?" shouted everybody at once.

From the shadowy sofa-pillowed corner just behind the supper table, young Kennilworth's face glowed suddenly into view. But a minute before I could have sworn that a girl's cheek lay against his. Yet now as he jumped to his feet the feminine glove that dropped from his fidgety fingers was twisted with extraordinary maliciousness, I noted, into a doll-sized caricature of a "Vamp."

"I could put the ocean into bronze, Mr. Delville," he said, "if anybody would give me a chance!"

Perhaps it was just this very ease and excitement of having booked anyone as perfect as young Kennilworth for the part of Someone with a Future that made me act as impulsively as I did regarding Ann Woltor.

We were sitting in our room in a Washington hotel before a very smoky fireplace one rather cross night in late January when I confided the information to my Husband.

"Oh, by the way, Jack," I said quite abruptly, "I've invited Ann Woltor for Rainy Week."

"Invited whom?" questioned my Husband above the rim of his newspaper.

"Ann Woltor," I repeated.

"Ann—what?" persisted my Husband.

"Ann Woltor," I re-emphasized.

"Who's she?" quickened my Husband's interest very faintly.

"Oh, she's a woman," I explained—"or a Girl—that I've been meeting 'most every day this last month at my hair-dresser's. She runs the accounts there or something and tries to keep everybody pacified. And reads the darndest books, all highbrow stuff. You'd hardly expect it! Oh, not modern highbrow, I mean, essays as bawdy as novels, but the old, serene highbrow,—Emerson and Pater and Wordsworth,—books that smell of soap and lavender, as well as brains. Reads 'em as though she liked 'em, I mean! Comes from New Zealand I've been told. Really, she's rather remarkable!"

"Must be!" said my Husband. "To come all the way from New Zealand to land in your hair-dresser's library!"

"It isn't my hair-dresser's library!" I corrected with faint asperity. "It's her own library! She brings the books herself to the office.

"And just what part," drawled my Husband, "is this New Zealand paragon, Miss Stoltor, to play in our Rainy Week?"

"Woltor," I corrected quite definitely. "Ann Woltor."

"Wardrobe mistress?" teased my Husband. "Or——?"

"She is going to play the part of the Someone With a Past," I said.

"What?" cried my Husband. His face was frankly shocked. "What?" he repeated blankly. "The most delicate part of the cast? The most difficult? The most hazardous? It seemed best to you, without consultation, without argument, to act so suddenly in the matter, and so—so all alone?"

"I had to act very suddenly," I admitted. "If I hadn't spoken just exactly the minute I did she would have been off to Alaska within another forty-eight hours."

"U-m-m," mused my Husband, and resumed his reading. But the half-inch of eye brow that puckered above the edge of his newspaper loomed definitely as the sample of a face that was still distinctly shocked.

When he spoke again I was quite ready for his question.

"How do you know that this Ann Woltor has got a past?" he demanded.

"How do we know young Kennilworth's got a future?" I counter- checked.

"Because he makes so much noise about it I suppose," admitted my Husband.

"By which very same method," I grinned, "I deduct the fact that Ann Woltor has got a past,—inasmuch as she doesn't make the very slightest sound whatsoever concerning it."

"You concede no personal reticence in the world?" quizzed my Husband.

"Yes, quite a good deal," I admitted. "But most of it I honestly believe is due to sore throat. A normal throat keeps itself pretty much lubricated I've noticed by talking about itself."

"Herself," corrected my Husband.

"Himself," I compromised.

"But this Ann Woltor has told you that she came from New Zealand," scored my Husband.

"Oh, no, she hasn't!" I contradicted. "It was the hair- dresser who suggested New Zealand. All Ann Woltor has ever told me was that she was going to Alaska! Anybody's