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 to the city brought no serious occupation to fill Fidelia's days.

David bothered about it, at first, when he observed that, after he left her, she seemed to spend about half of each morning in their room; for if he telephoned to her before eleven o'clock, she usually answered from the room. After eleven, the switchboard girl either offered to "page" Mrs. Herrick or reported definitely, "Mrs. Herrick is out." So when David found he would have noontime free, he learned to phone before eleven, if he wanted his wife to lunch in town with him. When he asked her, she always came, though she seemed always to have a luncheon engagement for any day he did not ask her.

She was "out" so regularly in the afternoon that he gave up phoning then. At night, she liked to tell him where she had been and what she had done. "It was auction, David, at half-cent points. Gertrude and I—" Gertrude was a Mrs. Vredick, of about Fidelia's age, who was one of her first friends at the hotel—"we won six dollars." Oh perhaps "it" had been a matinee or a motion picture with tea or a soda afterwards. Or Gertrude and she had been shopping; or they had had their fortunes told. Sometimes she had spent almost the entire afternoon with Gertrude, or some other friend, in a hair-dresser's going through the leisurely and agreeable "getting" of a manicure, or a shampoo and a "wave." But she always was in their room, or at least in the hotel, when he returned; always she was ready to go out with him anywhere to dinner or to the theater, to dance at the hotel or to do with him whatever else he wanted. And day after