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He had climbed into the dinner suit, and when he had first seen Patricia Weybourn he had felt that the effort of dressing had been wasted. He had expected to see a laughing-eyed, flirtatious tom-boy at whom he could talk after the manner of an eminent author; not the sleek, graceful, blonde mannequin, who flowed rather than walked, and whose artificially-beautiful eyes insolently expressed cold surprise that such an obvious man’s man should demean himself by writing ridiculous love-stories for silly women.

That first evening had not been a success for him. Grace and her visitor had occupied the chesterfield all the evening and had apparently forgotten him in their mutual reminiscences; so that he had had plenty of opportunity to compare the “birds of a feather.” He had found the descriptive phrase inapposite, for the two women were of strikingly dissimilar feather, and his fancy then had been for the quieter plumage of Grace.

Then he had seen Grace as petite, neat and eminently lovable. The mother-light had given her a beauty which the other woman, for all her physical perfection, had lacked. A softness in her eyes and voice, the winning tact and practical sense of which he knew her possessed, her imagination, everything—created to make and grace a real home for a lucky man. He had known himself for that lucky man and had loved her whole-heartedly then.

Patricia Weybourn he had mentally labelled ‘ultra’—ultra-smart in attire, ultra-blonde, ultra-languid, ultra-graceful, ultra-beautiful in a hard fashion, ultra-surprised and disappointed that her friend should have married a man who would have made a sword appear mightier than a pen. Ultra-uninteresting he had found her when he escorted her to the tramcar at the corner of the next street, and he had considered the tales of her conquests to be fairy tales, or her victims half-wits. He would have