The baby was wailing, a little hungry call, which made her mother take her up and say, hastily:  “It’s time to feed her.  You won’t mind, mother?”

“Yes, I do mind,” said the little lady.  “I don’t like that Madonna effect, with the baby in your arms.  It makes me feel horribly frivolous and worldly, Cecily.  But it doesn’t change my mind a bit.”

After a pause, the Madonna-creature asked, “Who is Valentine Landry?”

Mrs. Beale had her saucy little cap off, and was brushing out her thin, light locks in which the gray showed slightly.  But she stopped long enough to explain.  “He isn’t half as sentimental as his name.  I met him in Chicago at the Warburtons’, just before I made a success of my book.  I was very tired, and he cheered me a lot.  He’s from Denver, and he made his money in mines.  He hasn’t married, because he hasn’t had time.  We’re awfully good friends, but he doesn’t know my age.  He knows that I have a daughter, but not a grand-daughter.  He thinks of me as a young woman—­not as a grandmother-creature in black silk and mitts—­”

“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.”