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 ing because I don't smoke myself," Carrie contributed. "But I always say no, I don't smoke, simply because I never have, but I don't disapprove at all."

Kate slipped upstairs to turn down their bed, and put out the cobweb nightgown and soft blue silk kimona with plum blossoms drifting across its sky, so fragrant. And Joe's old washed-out pajamas. Goodness! Why hadn't he gotten some new? That girl, to see him in those old things, with the bright unfaded patch!

"People who never drank before are drinking since prohibition," Hoagland was announcing when she came downstairs. "Now in my opinion light wines and beer"

"Oh, Joe! A moth!"

"Where?"

"There—no—Evelyn! By you!"

She dashed forward, clapping.

"Mother, you're as good as Pavlowa, only you ought to be in a nightie."

It was her one moment of naturalness, of honest passion, in the whole tense evening. Only Joe seemed natural. Evelyn, bored and depressed to exhaustion, felt shut away from him. She had married a stranger who was her only friend.

Joe married. Jodie Green married. I can't make it seem true, Kate thought. Where were the children? Charlotte, good and serious, putting her pennies into the little iron house, and eating each Easter's choco-