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Wanning lingered behind his wife, looking at her in the mirror.

“Well, did you tell the girls, Julia?” he asked, trying to speak casually.

Mrs. Wanning looked up and met his eyes in the glass. “The girls?”

She noticed a strange expression come over his face.

“About your health, you mean? Yes, dear, but I tried not to alarm them. They feel dreadfully. I’m going to have a talk with Dr. Seares myself. These specialists are all alarmists, and I’ve often heard of his frightening people.”

She rose and took her husband’s arm, drawing him toward the fireplace.

“You are not going to let this upset you, Paul? If you take care of yourself, everything will come out all right. You have always been so strong. One has only to look at you.”

“Did you,” Wanning asked, “say anything to Harold?”

“Yes, of course. I saw him in town today, and he agrees with me that Seares draws the worst conclusions possible. He says even the young men are always being told the most terrifying things. Usually they laugh at the doctors and do as they please. You certainly don’t look like a sick man, and you don’t feel like one, do you?”

She patted his shoulder, smiled at him encouragingly, and rang for the maid to come and hook her dress.

When the maid appeared at the door, Wanning went out through the bathroom to his own sleeping chamber. He was too much dispirited to put on a dinner coat, though such remissness was always noticed. He sat down and waited for the sound of the gong, leaving his door open, on the chance that perhaps one of his daughters would come in.

When Wanning went down to dinner he found his wife already at her chair, and the table laid for four.

“Harold,” she explained, “is not coming home. He has to attend a first night in town.”

A moment later their two daughters entered, obviously “dressed.” They both wore earrings and masses of hair. The daughters’ names were Roma and Florence,–Roma, Firenze, one of the young men who came to the house often, but not often enough, had called them. Tonight they were going to a rehearsal of “The Dances of the Nations,”–a benefit performance in which Miss Roma was to lead the Spanish dances, her sister the Grecian.

The elder daughter had often been told that her name suited her admirably. She looked, indeed, as we are apt to think the unrestrained beauties of later Rome must have looked,–but as their portrait busts emphatically declare they did not. Her head was massive, her lips full and crimson, her eyes large and heavy-lidded, her forehead low. At costume balls and in living pictures she was always Semiramis, or Poppea, or Theodora. Barbaric accessories brought out something cruel and even rather brutal in her handsome face. The men who were attracted to her were somehow afraid of her.

Florence was slender, with a long, graceful neck, a restless head, and a flexible mouth–discontent lurked about the corners of it. Her shoulders were pretty, but her neck and arms were too thin. Roma was always struggling to keep within a certain weight–her chin and upper arms grew persistently more solid–and Florence was always striving to attain a certain weight. Wanning used sometimes to wonder why these disconcerting fluctuations could not go the other way; why Roma could not melt away as easily as did her sister, who had to be sent to Palm Beach to save the precious pounds.

“I don’t see why you ever put Rickie Allen in charge of the English country dances,” Florence said to her sister, as they sat down. “He knows the figures, of course, but he has no real style.”

Roma looked annoyed. Rickie Allen was one of the men who came to the house almost often enough.

“He is absolutely to be depended upon, that’s why,” she said firmly.

“I think he is just right for it, Florence,” put in Mrs. Wanning. “It’s remarkable he should feel that he can give up the time; such a busy man. He must be very much interested in the movement.”