The Vinegar Tree
by Paul Osborn

Laura Merrick, restless as she realizes in her forties that her husband is still years older than she is, lives largely in an imaginative past in which a handsome young artist figured prominently one purple afternoon.

Mrs. Merrick now believes that artist to have been the same Max Lawrence who is week-ending with the Merricks, and lays her plans accordingly.

She is greatly distressed when her own daughter seems about to take Max away from her, but is reasonably content in the end when she makes the discovery that the artist with whom she had spent the afternoon was really Lawrence Mack, the pianist, and not Max Lawrence, painter.