Warren shaved on for a moment in silence, then with a rather important air he said impulsively: 

“Well, I’ll tell you, although she told me in confidence, and of course nothing may come of it.  You won’t say anything about it, of course?  She wants to go on the stage.”

“Really!” said Rachael, who, for some reason she could not at this moment define, was finding the conversation extraordinarily distasteful.

“Yes, she’s had it in mind for years,” Warren pursued with simplicity.  “And she’s had some good offers, too.  You can see that she’s the kind of girl that would make an immediate hit, that would get across the footlights, as it were.  Of course, it all depends upon how hard she’s willing to work, but I believe she’s got a big future before her!”

There was a short silence while he finished the operation of shaving, and Rachael, who was busy with the defective clasp of a string of pearls, bent absorbedly over the microscopic ring and swivel.

“Let’s think about the dinner,” she said presently.  She found that he had already planned almost all the details.

When it took place, about ten days later, she resolutely steeled herself for an experience that promised to hold no special enjoyment for her.  Her love for her husband made her find in his enthusiasm for Magsie something a little pitiful and absurd.  Magsie was only a girl, a rather shallow and stupid girl at that, yet Warren was as excited over the arrangements for the dinner as if she had been the most important of personages.  If it had been some other dinner—­the affair for the English ambassador, or the great London novelist, or the fascinating Frenchman who had painted Jimmy—­she told herself, it would have been comprehensible!  But Warren, like all great men, had his simple, almost childish, phases, and this was one of them!

She watched her guest of honor, when the evening came, with a puzzled intensity.  Magsie was in her glory, sparkling, chattering, almost noisy.  Her exquisite little white silk gown was so low in the waist, and so short in the skirt, that it was almost no gown at all, yet it was amazingly smart.  She had touched her lips with red, and her eyelids were cunningly given just a hint of elongation with a black pencil.  Her bright hair was pushed severely from her face, and so trimly massed and netted as not to show its beautiful quantity, and yet, somehow, one knew the quantity was there in all its gold glory.

Rachael, magnificent in black-and-white, was ashamed of herself for the instinctive antagonism that she began to feel toward this young creature.  It was not the fact of Magsie’s undeniable youth and beauty that she resented, but it was her affectations, her full, pouting lips, her dimples, her reproachful upward glances.  Even these, perhaps, in themselves, she did not resent, she mused; it was their instant effect upon Warren and, to a greater or lesser degree, upon all the other men present, that filled her with a sort of patient scorn.  Rachael wondered what Warren’s feeling would have been had his wife suddenly picked out some callow youth still in college for her admiring laughter and earnest consideration.