Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/115

 most of her guests before the hour set for the meal. Mrs. Barnes, sensitive though absent-minded, arrived without either having accepted or declined her invitation, it appearing later that she thought she really had accepted. Three days after the dinner had been given a tardy note of apology was received from Dr. Earle in which he explained that the arrival of some friends from Seattle just at the time Miss Gale's note came had entirely driven the matter of her dinner out of his mind, and he had just that morning come upon it while straightening up his desk. He trusted that his seeming neglect had not caused Virginia any undue annoyance.

We kept all the acknowledgments, varied and many-colored as they were, and looked them over, after the dinner was a thing of the past, and commented on them. There was considerable food for thought in the little pile of envelopes and in the collection of bizarre notes which they contained.

"If these people," Virginia said to me, "who have been to boarding schools and college, who have traveled in every civilized country in the world and in some un-