"Oh, I a.s.sure you that my temper has been such for a week that my family have threatened to have me sent to a nervine asylum," Ethel Mott observed to Fred Rangely, who was calling on her, ostensibly to inquire after her health, some trifling indisposition having kept her housed for a few days. "What with my cold and my vexation at losing things I wanted to go to, I have been positively unendurable."

"That's your way of looking at it," he responded; "but I hardly fancy that anybody else found it out. But what has there been to lose, except the Throgmorton ball?"

"Well, first there was the concert Sat.u.r.day night."

"Do you care so much about the Symphonies, then? I thought you were the one girl in Boston who doesn't pretend to care for music."

"Oh, but we have lovely seats this year, and the nicest people all about us, you know. Thayer Kent and his mother are directly behind us."

"Where he can lean forward and talk to you," interrupted Rangely, jealously.

"Yes," she said, nodding with a gleam of mischievous laughter in her dark eyes. "And I do have a nice time at the Symphonies. Besides, I don't in the least object to the music, you know."

Fred fixed his gaze on a large old-fashioned oil painting on the opposite wall, a copy from some of the innumerable pastorals which have been made in imitation of Nicholas Poussin. It was of no particular value, but it was surrounded by a beautiful carved Venetian frame, and was one of those things which confer an air of distinction upon a Boston parlor, because they are plainly the art purchases of a bygone generation.

"But you have, of course, had no end of girls running in to see you,"

he observed.

"Yes; but, then, that didn't make up for the Throgmorton ball. You ask what else there was to lose; I should think that was enough. Why, Janet Graham says she never had such a lovely time in her life."

"Is Miss Graham engaged to Fred Gore?" Rangely asked.

Ethel's gesture of dissent showed how little she would have approved of such a consummation.

"No, indeed," she returned. "Fred Gore only wants Janet's money, anyway; and she can't abide him, any more than I can."

"Then, you have the correct horror of a marriage for money."

"I think a girl is a fool to let a man marry her for her money. She'd much better give him her fortune and keep herself back. Then she'd at least save something. I don't approve of people's marrying for money anyway; although, of course," she added, with a twinkle in her eye, "I think it is wicked to marry without it."

There shot through Rangely's mind the reflection that Thayer Kent had not an over-abundance of this world's goods; and to this followed the less pleasant thought that he was himself in the same predicament.

"But Jack Gerrish hasn't anything," he said, aloud.

"But Janet has enough, so she can marry anybody she wants to," was the reply; "and Jack Gerrish is too perfectly lovely for anything."

The visitor laughed, but he was evidently not at his ease. He was always uncomfortably conscious that Ethel had not the slightest possible scruple against laughing at him, and he was not a little afraid of her well-known propensity to tease. Ethel regarded him with secret amus.e.m.e.nt. A woman is seldom displeased at seeing a man disconcerted by her presence, even when she pities him and would fain put him at his ease. It is a tribute to her powers too genuine to be disputed, and while she may labor to overcome the man's feeling, her vanity cannot but be gratified that he has it.

"Did you ever know anything like the way Elsie Dimmont is going on with Dr. Wilson?" Ethel said, presently, by way of continuing the conversation. "I can't see what she finds to like in him. He's as coa.r.s.e as Fred Gore, only, of course, he's cleverer, and he isn't dissipated."

"Wilson isn't a half bad fellow," Rangely replied, rather patronizingly. "Though, of course, I can understand that you wouldn't care for that kind of a man."

"Am I so particular, then?"

"Yes, I think you are."

"Thank you for nothing."

"Oh, I meant to be complimentary, I a.s.sure you. Isn't it a compliment to be thought particular in your tastes?"

"That depends upon how you are told. Your manner was not at all calculated to flatter me. It said too plainly that you thought me captious."

"But I don't."

"Of course you wouldn't own it," Ethel retorted, playing with a tortoise-sh.e.l.l paper-cutter she had picked up from the table by which she sat; "but your manner was not to be mistaken. It betrayed you in spite of yourself."

Rangely knew how foolish he was to be affected by light banter like this, but for his life he could not have helped it. The fact that Ethel knew how easily she could tease him lent a tantalizing sparkle to her eyes. She smiled mockingly as he vainly tried to keep the flush from rising in his cheeks.

"You are singularly fond of teasing," he observed, in a manner he endeavored to make cool and philosophical.

"Now you are calling me singular as well as captious."

"The girl who is singular," returned he, in an endeavor to turn the talk by means of an epigram which only made matters worse for him, "the girl who is singular runs great risk of never becoming plural."

Ethel laughed merrily, her glee arising chiefly from a sense of the chance he was giving her to work up one of those playful mock quarrels which amused her and so thoroughly teased her admirer.

"Upon my word, Mr. Rangely," she said, a.s.suming an air of indignant surprise, "is it your idea of making yourself agreeable to tell an unfortunate girl that she is destined to be an old maid? I could stand being one well enough, but to be told that I've got to be is by no means pleasant."

He knew she was playing with him, but he could not on that account meet her on her own ground. He endeavored to protest.

"You are trying to make me quarrel."

"Make you quarrel?" she echoed. "I like that! Of course, though, to be so full of faults that you can't help abusing me is one way of making you quarrel."

"How you do twist things around!" exclaimed he, beginning to be thoroughly vexed.

She pursed up her lips and regarded him with an expression more aggravating than words could have been. She had been for several days deprived of the pleasure of teasing anybody, and her delight in vexing Rangely made his presence a temptation which she was seldom able to resist. She was unrestrained by any regard for the young author which should make her especially concerned how seriously she offended him; and when she now changed the conversation abruptly, it was with a forbearing air which was anything but soothing to his nerves.

"Don't you think," she asked, "that Mr. Berry was absurd in the way he acted about playing at Mrs. West's?"

"No, I can't say that I do," the caller retorted savagely. "Mrs. West gives out that she is going to give the neglected native musicians at last a chance to be heard, and then she invites them to play their compositions in her parlor. Westbrooke Berry isn't the man to be patronized in any such way. Just think of her having the cheek to give to a man whose work has been brought out in Berlin an invitation which is equivalent to saying that he can't get a public hearing, but she'll help him out by asking her guests to listen to him. Heavens! Mrs. West is a perfectly incredible woman."

Ethel smiled sweetly. In her secret heart she agreed with him; but it did not suit her mood to show that she did so.

"You seem bound to take the opposite view of everything to-day," she said, in tones as sweet as her smile; "or perhaps it is only that my temper has been ruined by my cold. I told you it had been bad."

He rose abruptly.

"If everything is to put us more at odds," he said, rather stiffly, "the sooner I withdraw, the better. I am sorry I have fallen under your displeasure; it is generally my ill luck to annoy you."

And in a few moments he was going down the street in a frame of mind not unusual to him after a call upon Miss Mott, from whose house he was apt to come away so ruffled and irritated that nothing short of a counteracting feminine influence could restore his self-complacency.

This office of comforter usually fell to the lot of Mrs. Frederick Staggchase. Indeed, his fondness for this lady was so marked as to give rise to some question among his intimates whether he were not more attached to her than to the avowed object of his affection.

An hour after he had made his precipitate retreat from Ethel's, he found himself sitting in the library at Mrs. Staggchase's, with his hostess comfortably enthroned in a great chair of carved oak on the opposite side of the fire. The conversation had somehow turned upon marriage. There is always a certain fascination, a piquant if faint sense of being upon the borderland of the forbidden, which makes such a discussion attractive to a man and woman who are playing at making love when marriage stands between them.

"But, of course," Rangely had said, "two married people can't live at peace when one of them is in love with somebody else."