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 "Dear, you're taking things all the wrong way," I said. "Chris is ill—"

"He's well enough to remember her all right," she replied unanswerably. Her silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched her lips for some moments. "After all, I suppose I can sit down to it. Other women do. Teddy Rex keeps a Gaiety girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear it." She shrugged in answer to my silence. "What else is it, do you think? It means that Chris is a man like other men. But I did think that bad women were pretty. I suppose he's had so much to do with pretty ones that a plain one's a change."

"Kitty! Kitty! how can you!"

But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice.

"This is all a blind," she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence. "He's pretending."

I, who had felt his agony all the evening