of it, besides becoming benefactors of our kind. The ice and the ice cream would pay for the cold air; our cold air service would bring a clear profit. We'd guarantee a temperature through the summer months of, say, seventy degrees."

"Then," Porter drawled, "the next thing would be to get the doctors in, for a pneumonia branch; and after that the undertakers would demand admission, and then the tombstone people. You're a bright young man, Warry. I heard you stringing that Englishman at the club the other day about your scheme for piping water from the Atlantic Ocean to irrigate the American desert, and he thought you meant it."

"Then we'll all suffer," Miss Porter declared, "for he'll go home and put it in a book, and there'll be no end of it."

Raridan was in gay spirits. He had come from a call on a young married couple who had just gone to [Pg 37]housekeeping. He had met there a notoriously awkward young man, who moved through Clarkson houses leaving ruin in his wake.

[Pg 37]

"There ought to be some way of insuring against Whitely," said Raridan, musingly. "Perhaps a social casualty company could be formed to protect people from his depredations. You know, Mr. Saxton, they've really had to cut him off from refreshments at parties,—he was always spilling salads on the most expensive gowns in town. And these poor young married things, with their wedding loot huddled about them in their little parlors! There is a delightful mathematical nicety in the way he sweeps a tea table with his coat tails. He never leaves enough for a sample. But this was the worst! You know that polar bear skin that Mamie Shepard got for a wedding present; well, it makes her house look like a menagerie. Whitely was backing out—a thing I've begged him never to try—and got mixed up with the head of that monster; kicked all the teeth out, started to fall, gathered in the hat rack, broke the glass out of it, and before Shepard could head him off, he pulled down the front door shade."

"But Mr. Whitely sings beautifully," urged Miss Porter.

"He'd have to," said Warry, "with those feet."

"You needn't mind what Raridan says," Mr. Porter remarked. "He's very unreliable."

"The office of social censor is always an ungrateful one," Raridan returned, dolefully. "But I really don't know what you'd do without me here."

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