With the quickness of a squirrel Isobel Carson, demurely garbed as befitted a poor relative, noted the disapprobation conveyed by Lady Gertrude's sweeping glance.
"I suppose that's what they're wearing now in town?" she asked conversationally of Nan across the table.
Roger looked up and seeing the young, privet-white throat and shoulders which gleamed above the black, smiled contentedly.
"It's jolly pretty, isn't it?" he rejoined, innocently unaware that any intention lurked behind his cousin's query.
"It might be--if there were more of it," said Lady Gertrude icily. She had not failed to notice earlier that Nan was wearing the abbreviated skirt of the moment--though in no way an exaggerated form of it--revealing delectable shoes and cobwebby stockings which seemed to cry out a gay defiance to the plain and serviceable footgear which she herself affected.
"It does look just a tiny bit daring--in the country," murmured Isobel deprecatingly. "You see, we're used to such quiet fashions here."
"I don't think anything can be much quieter than black," replied Nan evenly.
There for the moment the matter rested, but the next day Roger had asked her, rather diffidently, if she couldn't find something plainer to wear in an evening.
"I thought you liked the dress," she countered.
"But your mother has been talking t0 you about it? Is that it?"
"Even Isobel thought it a little outré for country wear," he said eagerly, making matters worse instead of better, in the blundering way a man generally contrives to do when he tries to settle a feminine difference of opinion.
Nan's foot tapped the floor impatiently and a spark of anger lit itself in her eyes.
"I don't think my choice of clothes has anything to do with Miss Carson," she answered sharply.
"No, sweetheart, of course it hasn't, really. But I know you'd like to please my mother--and she's not used to these new styles, you see."
He stumbled on awkwardly, then drew her into his arms and kissed her.
"To please me--wear something else," he said. Although unformulated even to himself, Roger's creed was of the old school. He quite honestly believed that a woman's chief object in life was to please her male belongings, and it seemed to him a perfectly good arrangement.