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“Come, come,” interrupted the Doctor, who had been eyeing her profile with a curious half amused expression, all through the reading: “Don’t let us get on that subject to-night. A story is a story. You have asked, and you have received. None of you seem to really like any story but your own, and I must confess that among us, we are putting forth a strange baggage.”

“On the contrary,” said the Critic, “I think we are doing pretty well for a crowd of amateurs.”

“You are not an amateur,” laughed the Journalist, “and yours was the worst yet.”

“I deny it,” said the Critic. “Mine had real literary quality, and a very dramatic climax.”

“Oh, well, if death is dramatic–perhaps. You are the only one up to date who has killed his heroine.”

“No story is finished until the heroine is dead,” said the Journalist. “This woman,–I’ll bet she had another romance.”

“Did she?” asked the Critic of the Divorcee, who was still nervously rolling her manuscript in both hands.

“I don’t know. How should I? And if I did I shouldn’t tell you. It isn’t a true story, of course.” And she rose from her chair and walked away into the moonlight.

“Do you mean to say,” ejaculated the Violinist, who admired her tremendously, “that she made that up in the imagination she carries around under that pretty fluffy hair? I’d rather that it were true–that she had picked it up somewhere.”

As we began to prepare to go in, the Doctor looked down the path to where the Divorcee was still standing. After a moment’s hesitation he took her lace scarf from the back of her chair, and strolled after her. The Sculptor shrugged his shoulders with such a droll expression that we all had to smile. Then we went indoors.

“Well,” said the Doctor, as he joined her–she told me about it afterwards–“was that the way it happened?”

“No, no,” replied the Divorcee, petulantly. “That is not a bit the way it happened. That is the way I wish it had happened. Oh, no. I was brought up to believe in the proprietary rights in marriage, and I did what I thought became a womanly woman. I asserted my rights, and made a common or garden row.”

The Doctor laughed, as she stamped her foot at him.

“Pardon–pardon,” said he. “I was only going to say ‘Thank God.’ You know I like it best that way.”

“I wish I had not told the old story,” she said pettishly. “It serves me quite right. Now I suppose they’ve got all sorts of queer notions in their heads.”

“Nonsense,” said the Doctor. “All authors, you know, run the risk of getting mixed up in their romances–think of Charlotte Bronte.”

“I’m not an author, and I am going to bed,–to repent of my folly,” and she sailed into the house, leaving the Doctor gazing quizzically after her. Before she was out of hearing, he called to her: “I say, you haven’t changed a bit since ’92.”

She heard but she did not answer.