Friday, and a new gown for each-Nina fancied herself already a popular and lovely debutante. Harriet imagined that she saw something of a brother's pity in Ward's eyes as he watched her. Ward himself looked his best in his evening black, and several years older than he really was.

"We're a handsome couple, Miss Harriet," said Ward, with a glance toward the door of solid mirror that chanced to reflect them both. "Aren't we, Mother?"

"You're an idiot!" said Nina, scornfully. Harriet laughed maternally, but in spite of herself her idle dream of the afternoon returned for a second, and she wondered just how that faintly supercilious smile of Isabelle's would be affected if she had her own right, here in this family group, a Carter of the Carters, daughter of the house. And thinking this, her smoky blue eyes met Ward's, and perhaps there was something in them that he had not seen there before. At all events, she was ashamed to see him colour suddenly, and become a little incoherent, and to have him turn to her his full attention, with a sort of boyish clumsiness that was touching in its way. Imaginary or not, the trifling episode troubled her, and as Madame Carter came majestically in and the little clock on the dresser pointed to the hour, she said her good-nights, and carried Nina off again.

Richard Carter's wife and mother differed in no particular more strikingly than in their attitude toward the toilet artifices they both employed so lavishly. The old lady's beauty was even more than Isabelle's assisted by art, for her snowy-white hair was a wig, her teeth not her own, and her eyebrows quite openly manufactured without one single natural hair to build upon. But it pleased her generation to regard these facts as sacred, and to assume that the secrets of the boudoir were unsuspected. Even Nina never saw so much as a powder puff in her grandmother's dressing room, and any compliment upon her hair or complexion Madame Carter received with gracious dignity.

She looked at Ward's departing back, now, and remarked with pointed reproof:

"My son has never seen his mother even in the act of brushing her hair! There are reserves--there are niceties--"

"Where did you have it brushed--down at the shop?" Isabelle asked, laughing. Madame Carter never failed to be staggered by her daughter-in-law's irreverence, yet she never could quite resist the criticisms that courted it.

"For the last few years, I admit," she conceded with a somewhat shaken dignity, "I admit that I have had recourse to what they call 'puffs'--you know what I mean? Made of my own hair, of course--"

"Made of your own imagination!" Isabelle amended, in her own heart. But she only gave the old lady a somewhat disquieting smile as she picked up the tumbled black fan and led the way down to dinner.

CHAPTER III

Nina was duly dressed for the tea-party the next day, and went to show herself to her mother while Harriet dressed. The young girl really did look her best in the filmy white with its severely plain ruffles, and with a wide white hat on her thick, smoothly dressed hair. Miss Field, too, although she was very pale to-day, looked "simply gorgeous," as Isabelle expressed it, when she saw them off in the car, although Harriet's gown was not new, and the little flowered hat she had crushed down upon her splendid hair had been Isabelle's own a season ago. Harriet was in no holiday mood; she felt herself in a false position; this was to be one of the times when she paid high for all the beauty and luxury of her life.

"... so then when she came to me," Nina was recounting the reception of some celebrity at school, "of course I was awfully shy; you know me!" She was suddenly diverted. "But I'm not as shy as I used to be, am I, Miss Harriet?" she asked, confidingly.

"Not nearly!" Harriet made herself say, encouragingly.

"Well, then," Nina resumed, "when she came to me I don't know what I said--I just said something or other--I can't for the life of me remember what it was! Probably I just said that I had seen her in her last three plays or something like that, anyway--anyway, she said to Miss King that she had noticed me, and she said, 'It's an aristocratic face!' Amy Hawkes told me, for a trade last. The girls were wild--they were all so crazy to have her notice them, you know, and I thought--I thought of course she'd speak of Lucia or Ethel Benedict or one of those prettier girls; although," said Nina, with her little air of conscientiousness, "Ethel didn't look a bit pretty that day. Sometimes she does; sometimes she looks perfectly lovely! But that day she looked sort of colourless. 'Aristocratic'!" Nina laughed softly. "Well, I'd rather look aristocratic than be the prettiest girl in the world, wouldn't you?"

Harriet glanced at her with something like pity. This was Nina in her before-the-party mood. Her confidence and complacency would all begin to ooze away from her, presently, and the words that came so readily to Harriet would refuse to flow at all to any one else. She would come home saying that she hated parties because people were all so shallow and uninteresting, and that she couldn't help what her friends said of her, she just wouldn't descend to that sort of nonsense.

"Here we are!" Harriet rather drily interrupted the flood. Nina gave a startled glance at the lawns and gardens of the Jay mansion already dotted with awnings and chairs, and sprinkled with the bright gowns of the first arrivals. They were early, and their hostess, a handsome, heavily built woman with corsets like armourplate under her exquisite gown, and a blonde bang covering her forehead, came forward with her daughter to meet them. Francesca was as slight as a willow, with a demurely drooped little head and a honeyed little self-possessed manner.

"Very decent of you, Miss Field!" breathed Mrs. Jay, in a voice like that of a horn. "You girls run along now--people will be comin' at any minute. I'm going to take Miss Field to the table. Three hundred people comin'," she confided as Harriet followed her across the lawn, and to the rather quiet corner of the awninged porch where the tea table stood, "and Mist' Jay just sent me a message that he won't be here until six. My older daughter, Morgan, is stayin' with the Tom Underbills--you know their place--lovely people--Well, now, I'll leave you here, and you just ask for anything you need--"

The matron melted away; Harriet looked after her broad, retreating back indifferently. Everyone knew Mrs. Jay, a harmless, generous, good-natured and hospitable target for much secret criticism and laughter. The odd thing was, old Mrs. Carter had sometimes pointed out to the dutifully listening Harriet, that the woman really came of an excellent family, so that her little affectations, her fondness for the phrases "my older daughter, Morgan," and "lovely people, loads of money, you know them?" were honest enough, in their way. She would have loaned Harriet any amount of money, the girl reflected, smouldering, she would have shown her genuine friendship and generosity in a crisis. But she would not introduce people to Harriet this afternoon, and in a day or two she would send Harriet a bit of lace, or a dainty waist, as a delicate reminder that the courtesy had been a business one, after all.

The afternoon was the perfection of summer beauty, and after a few moments' solitude Harriet began to feel its spell. She put her cups and spoons in order, and chatted with a hovering maid. Some elderly persons came out and sat near, and were grateful for the quiet and the tea. From the reception line, on the lawn, came such a brainless confusion of jabbering and chattering as might well appall the old and nervous.

And presently the sun came out for Harriet in the arrival of a tall, swiftly moving, dark-eyed woman some ten years older than she was herself: Mary Putnam, one of the real friends the girl had gained in the last four years. Young Mrs. Putnam, Harriet used to think, with a little