willing to tell you where he's going! But the person who never tells you where he's been—! The person who never by word, deed or act correlates to-day with yesterday! The Here with the There—! I've been home with her twice to her room! I've watched her unpack the Alaska trunk! Not a thing in it older than this winter! Not a shoe nor a hat nor a glove that confides anything! No scent of fir-balsam left over from a summer vacation! No photograph of sister or brother! Yet it's rather an interesting little room, too,—awfully small and shabby after the somewhat plushy splendor of the hairdressing job—but three or four really erudite English Reviews on the table, a sprig of blue larkspur thrust rather negligently into a water glass, and a man's——"

"Blue larkspur in January?" demanded my Husband. "How—how old is this—this Woltor person?"

"Oh—twenty-five, perhaps," I shrugged.

With a gesture of impatience my Husband threw down his paper and began to poke the fire.

"Oh, Pshaw!" he said, "is our whole dramatic endeavor going to be wrecked by the monotony of everybody being 'twenty- five'?"

"Well—call it 'thirty-five' if you'd rather," I conceded. "Or a hundred and five! Arm Woltor wouldn't care! That's the remarkable thing about her face," I hastened with some fervor to explain. "There's no dating on it! This calamity that has happened to her,—whatever it is, has wrung her face perfectly dry of all contributive biography except the mere structural fact of at least reasonably conservative birth and breeding."

A little bit abruptly my Husband dropped the fire-tongs.

"You like this Ann Woltor, don't you?" he said.

"I like her tremendously," I acknowledged.

"Tremendously as a person and tremendously for the part!" I insisted.

"Yet there's something about it that worries you?" quizzed my Husband not unamiably.

"There is," I said, "just one thing. She's got a broken tooth."

With a gesture of real irritation my Husband sank down in his chair again and snatched up the paper.

It was ten minutes before he spoke again.

"Is it a front tooth?" he questioned with out lifting his eyes from the page.

"It is," I said.

When my Husband jumped up from his chair this time he showed no sign at all of ever intending to return to it. As he reached for his hat and coat and started for the door, he tried very hard to grin. But the effort was poor. This was no mere marital disagreement, but a real professional shock.

"I simply can't stand it," he grinned. "One's prepared, of course, for a tragedy queen to sport a broken heart but when it comes to a broken tooth—!"

"Wait till you see her!" I said. There was nothing else to say. "Wait till you see her!"

Even with the door closed behind him he came back once more to tell me how he felt.

"Oh!" he shivered. "O—H!"

Truly if we hadn't gone out together the very next day and found George Keets I don't know what would have happened. Depression still hung very heavily over my Husband's heart.

"Here it is almost February," he brooded, "and even with what we've got, we're still short the Celibate and the Singing Voice and the May Girl."

It was just then that we turned the street corner and met George Keets.

"Why—why the Celibate—of all persons!" we both gasped as in a single breath, and rushed upon him.

Now it may seem a little strange instead of this that we have never thought to feature poor Rollins as the Celibate. To "double" him as it were as Celibate and Bore. Conserving thereby one by no means inexpensive outfit of water-proof clothes, twenty-one meals, a week's wash, and Heaven knows how many rounds of Scotch at a time of imminent drought. But Rollins—though as far as anybody knows, a bachelor and eminently chaste—is by no means my idea of a Celibate. Oh, not Rollins! Not anybody with a mind like Rollins! For Rollins, poor dear, would marry every day in the week if anybody would have him. It's the "other people" who have kept Rollins virgin. But George Keets on the other hand is a good deal of a "fascinator" in spite of his austerity, perhaps indeed because of his austerity, tall, lean, good-looking, extravagantly severe, thirty-eight years old, and a classmate of my Husband at college. Whether Life would ever succeed or not in breaking down his unaccountable intention never-to- mate, that intention,—physical, mental, moral, psychic, call it whatever you choose,—was stamped indelibly and for all time on the curiously incongruous granite-like finish of his originally delicate features. Life had at least done interesting historical things to George Keets's face.

"Oh, George!" cried my Husband, "I thought you were in Egypt digging mummies."

"I was," admitted George without any further palaver of greeting.

"When did you get back?" cried my Husband, "And what are you doing now!"

"And where are you going to be in May?" I interposed with perfectly uncontrollable interest.

"Why, I'm just off the boat, you know," brightened George. "A drink would be good, of course. But first I'd just like to run into the library for a minute to see if they've put in any new thrillers while I've been gone. There's a corking new book on Archselurus that ought to be due about now."

"On w-what?" I stammered.

"Oh, fossil cats, you know, and all that sort of thing," explained George chivalrously. "But, of course—you, Mrs. Delville," he hastened now to appease me, "would heaps rather hear about Paris fashions, I know. So if you-people really should want me in May I'll try my best, I promise you, to remember every latest wrinkle of lace, or feather. Only, of course," he explained with typical conscientiousness, "in the museums and the libraries one doesn't see just—of course— the——"

"On the contrary, Mr. Keats," I interrupted hectically, "there is no subject in the world that interests me more—at the moment—than Mummies. And by the second week in May that interest will have assumed proportions that——"

"S-sh!" admonished my Husband. "But really, George," he himself hastened to cut in, "if you could come to us the second week in May——"

"May?" considered George. "Second week? Why, certainly I will." And bolted for the library, while my Husband and I in a perfectly irresistible impulse drew aside on the curbing to watch him disappear.

Equally unexplainably three totally non-concerned women turned also to watch him.

"It's his shoulders," I ventured. "The amazing virility of his shoulders contrasted with the stinginess of his smile."

"Stinginess nothing!" snapped my Husband. "Devil take him!"

"He may—yet," I mused as we swung into step again.

So now we had nothing to worry about—or rather no uncertainty to worry about except the May Girl and the Singing Voice.

"The Singing Voice," my Husband argued, "might be picked up by good fortune at most any cabaret show or choral practise. Not any singing voice would do, of course. It must be distinctly poignant. But even poignancy may be found sometimes where you least expect it,—some reasonably mature, faintly disappointed sort of voice, usually, lilting with unquestionable loveliness, just this side of real professional success.

"But where in the world should we find a really ingenuous Ingénue?"

"They don't exist any more!" I asserted. "Gone out of style like the Teddy Bear—! Old Ingénues you see, of course, sometimes, sweet and precious and limp—as old Teddy Bears. But a brand new Ingénue—? Don't you remember the awful search we had last year and even then——?"

"Maybe you're right," worried my Husband.

And then the horrid attack of neuralgia descended on poor Mr. Husband so suddenly, so acutely, that we didn't worry at all about anything else for days! And even when that worry was over, instead of starting off gaily together for the Carolinas as we had intended, to search through steam-heated corridors, and green velvet