"If only she were a boy!"

Mrs. Treharne almost moaned the words.

She tugged nervously at her absurdly diaphanous boudoir jacket, vainly attempting to fasten it with fluttering, uncontrolled fingers; and she shuddered, though her dressing-room was over-warm.

Heloise, who was doing her hair, juggled and then dropped a flaming red coronet braid upon the rug. The maid, a thin-lipped young woman with a jutting jaw and an implacable eye, pantomimed her annoyance. Before picking up the braid she glued the backs of her hands to her smoothly-lathed hips. Mrs. Treharne, in the glass, could see Heloise's drab-filmed grey-blue eyes darting sparks.

"I shall resume," croaked the maid in raucous French, "when Madame is through writhing and wriggling and squirming."

Laura Stedham—she was relaxing luxuriously in the depths of a chair that fitted her almost as perfectly as her gown—smiled a bit wickedly.

"Forgive me if I seem catty, Tony," said Laura in her assuaging contralto, "but it is such a delight to find that there is some one else who is bullied by her maid. Mine positively tyrannizes over me."

"Oh, everybody bullies me," said Mrs. Treharne, querulously, holding herself rigid in order not to again draw Heloise's wrath. "Everybody seems to find it a sort of diversion, a game, to browbeat and hector and bully-rag me."

"Surely I don't, afflicted one—do I?" Laura tacked a little rippling laugh to the question.

"You do worse, my dear—you laugh at me," plaintively replied the fading woman huddled before the glass. She was haggard as from a trouble that has been unsuccessfully slept upon, and her mouth—not yet made into a crimson bow through Heloise's deft artistry—was drawn with discontent. "Heaven on high, if only she were a boy!" she broke out petulantly again, after a little pause.

This time there was genuine enjoyment in Laura's laugh.

"Don't scowl, Antoinette—I know I am a beast for laughing," she said, abandoning her chair and lissomely crossing the room to glance at some new photographs on a mantel. "But, really, you say that so often that it sounds like the refrain to a topical song. 'If only she were a boy—If only she were a boy!'—don't you catch the rhythm of it? I wonder, Tony, how many times I have heard you give utterance to that phrase during the past few years—just?"

"You haven't heard me say it any oftener than I've meant it, my dear—be very sure of that," said Mrs. Treharne, without a symptom of a smile. Her sense of humor was embryonic, and Laura's laughter and words, obviously meant merely in mitigation, jarred upon her. "And a remark is none the less true for being repeated, is it?" she went on in her plaintive monotone. "I do wish Louise had been born a boy. You would, too, if you were in my place. You know you would."

"But, dear Tony, it is such a futile, such a dreadfully childish wish," said Laura, striving to erase the smile from her face. "It is like wishing for the fairy prince, or the magic carpet, or the end of the rainbow. Worry makes wrinkles, dear. That may sound bromidic, but it's true. Why worry yourself through all the years with wishing so impossible—I was going to say so insane—a wish? Not only that—forgive me for saying it, dear, won't you?—but it is rather a grisly wish, too; and so unfair to the girl, really. Don't you think—don't you know—that it is?"

"Don't scold, Laura—please," said Mrs. Treharne, almost in a whimper. "You don't know what a miserable mess I am in. You haven't given me time to tell you. Louise is coming home immediately."

"For the holidays, naturally," said Laura. "Why shouldn't the poor child come home for the holidays? It will be the first time she has had her holidays at home since she went away to school—nearly four years, I think—isn't it?"

"I hope you are not meaning that for a reproach," accused the haggard lady, now being corseted by the lusty-armed Heloise. "You are in a shocking humor today; and I did so depend upon you for advice and comfort, if not consolation, when I 'phoned you to come over."