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“Mother! nobody expects you to wear black silk and mitts–“

“Well, you expect me to have a black-silk-and-mitt mind. You know you are thinking this very minute that there is no idiot like an old one–Cecily–“

The girl flushed. “I don’t think you are quite kind, mother.”

Mrs. Beale laughed and forgot to be cynical. “I know what you’d like to have me, dearie, but this is my moment of emancipation.” She crossed the room and looked down at the tiny bit of humanity curled like a kitten in the curve of her daughter’s arm. “I’m not going to be your grandmother, yet, midget,” she announced, with decision. Then, “Cecily, I think when she’s old enough I shall have her call me–Cupid–“

And laughing in the face of her daughter’s horrified protest, the mutinous grandparent retired precipitately to her own room.

Three hours later, Mrs. Cissy Beale went forth to conquer, gowned in a restaurant frock of shadow lace topped by a black tulle hat.

Valentine Landry, greeting her in Cecily’s white-and-gold drawing-room, was breezy and radiant. “You’re as lovely as ever,” he said, as he took her hand; “perhaps a bit lovelier because you are glad to see me.”

“I am glad,” she assured him; “and it is so nice to have you come before the summer is at an end. We can have a ride out into Westchester, and come back by daylight to dinner.”

“And no chaperons?”

“No.” She was looking up at him a little wistfully. “We know each other too well to have to drag in a lot of people, don’t we? It is the men whom women trust with whom they go alone.”

He met her glance gravely. “Do you know,” he said, “that you have the sweetest way of putting things? A man simply has to come up to your expectations. He’d as soon think of disappointing a baby as of disappointing you.”

His selection of a simile was unfortunate. Mrs. Beale’s eyes became fixed upon a refractory button of her glove.

“Please help me,” she said; “your fingers are stronger,” and as he bent above her hand she forgot the baby, forgot her new estate, forgot everything except the joy she felt at having his smooth gray head so close to her own.

When he had her safely beside him in his big car he asked, “What made you run away from me in Chicago?”

“My daughter came home from Europe.”

“I can’t quite think of you with a grown daughter.”

“Cecily’s a darling.” Mrs. Beale’s voice held no enthusiasm.

Landry, noting her tone, looked faintly surprised. “You and she must have great good times together.”

“Oh, yes–“

Mrs. Beale wished that he wouldn’t talk about Cecily. Cecily had married before good times were possible. They had never played together–she and the little daughter for whom she had toiled and sacrificed.

Landry’s voice broke in upon her meditations: “I should like to meet Cecily.”

Mrs. Beale switched him away from the topic expeditiously. He should not see her as yet in the bosom of her family. He should not. He should not see Cecily with her air of mature motherliness. He should not see Victor, Cecily’s husband, who was ten years older than Cecily and only ten years younger than herself. He should not hear her big son Bob call her “Grandma.” He should not gaze upon the pretty deference of Bob’s little wife toward the queen-dowager!

Dining later opposite Landry in a great golden palace, Cissy seemed like some gay tropical bird. In her new and lovely clothes she was very pretty, very witty, almost girlishly charming. Yet Landry was conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment. She had been more serenely satisfying in Chicago–not so brilliantly hard, not so persistently vivacious. How could he know that the change was one of desperation? Cissy, as grandmother, felt that she must prove, even to herself, that she was not yet a back number.

With this rift in the lute of their budding romance, they ate and drank and went to the play and had what might otherwise have been an enchanted ride home in the moonlight. But when Landry said “Good-night” Cissy felt the loss of something in his manner. His greeting that afternoon had had in it something almost of tenderness; his farewell was commonplace and slightly constrained.