“Absolutely not.  We are both free as air—­technically.  If you were in love yourself you would know how much that amounts to by way of freedom.”

Carlotta’s golden head was bowed.  She did not answer her friend’s implication that she could not be expected to comprehend the delicate, invisible, omnipotent shackles of love.

“Don’t tell anyone, Carlotta, please.  It is our secret—­Alan’s and mine.  Maybe it will always he a secret unless he—­measures up.”

“You are not going to tell your uncle?”

“There is nothing to tell yet.”

“And I suppose this is the end of poor Dick.”

“Don’t be silly, Carlotta.  Dick never said a word of love to me in his life.”

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t think ’em.  You have convenient eyes, Tony darling.  You see only what you wish to see.”

“I didn’t want to see Alan’s love.  I tried dreadfully hard not to.  But it set up a fire in my own house and blazed and smoked until I had to do something about it.  See here, Carlotta.  I’d like to ask you a question or two.  You are not really going to marry Herbert Lathrop, are you?”

A queer little shadow, almost like a veil, passed over Carlotta’s face at this counter charge.

“Why not?” she parried.

“You know why not.  He is exactly what Hal Underwood calls him, a poor fish.  He is as close to being a nonentity as anything I ever saw.”

“Precisely why I selected him,” drawled Carlotta.  “I’ve got to marry somebody and poor Herbert hasn’t a vice except his excess of virtue.  We can’t have another old maid in the family.  Aunt Lottie is a shining example of what to avoid.  I am not going to be ‘Lottie the second’ I have decided on that.”

“As if you could,” protested Tony indignantly.

“Oh, I could.  You look at Aunt Lottie’s pictures of fifteen years ago.  She was just as pretty as I am.  She had loads of lovers but somehow they all slipped through her fingers.  She has been sex-starved.  She ought to have married and had children.  I don’t want to be a hungry spinster.  They are infernally miserable.”

“Carlotta!” Tony was a little shocked at her friend’s bluntness, a little puzzled as to what lay behind her arguments.  “You don’t have to be a hungry spinster.  There are other men besides Herbert that want to marry you.”

“Certainly.  Some of them want to marry my money.  Some of them want to marry my body.  I grant you Herbert is a poor fish in some ways, but at least he wants to marry me, myself, which is more than the others do.”

“That isn’t true.  Hal Underwood wants to marry you, yourself.”

“Oh, Hal!” conceded Carlotta.  “I forgot him for a moment.  You are right.  He is real—­too real.  I should hurt him marrying him and not caring enough.  That is why a nonentity is preferable.  It doesn’t know what it is missing.  Hal would know.”

“But there is no reason why you shouldn’t wait until you find somebody you could care for,” persisted Tony.