seasoned, and resigned the present Grover Thanet seemed when compared with that impossibly amative schoolboy of last May. Have I matured, he wondered, or just got tired?
"Did I tell you I'm having a great big portrait of myself painted?" Floss broke in on his revery. "I'm going to send it to my Christian sister. Not that she loves me so dearly, but she wants my picture on the dining-room wall just the same. So she can say, 'Yes, that's my sister, Princess Grushki'—it sounds so grand. My folks all thought I married poor Paul for his title, but I didn't. I married him for his moustache. And one bright day he went and cut it off because a thin girl at the Marigny didn't like it—it tickled her, I guess—that's how life is. Never mind, I get a lot of fun out of it, thanks to my old man who made the most bathtubs of anybody in the world. When poor Pa died, Etta wore enough crepe to drape the town hall, and under it all she was thinking, Now there isn't anybody left in the family who'll try to eat in his shirtsleeves. Each spring she comes over here to pick a quarrel with me, but I refuse to fight with my only-begotten sister. Very cordial and affectionate, you know, and give her the best rooms and all, then fill the rest of the house with all the lousey artists I know and let 'em raise hell. You'd be surprised how soon your sister leaves for Nice, and that's over for another year."
"The one thing about you I can't make out," he
