Carl walked over and, smoothly ignoring the pocket entertainer, said: "So glad to see you, Miss Winslow. I think this is my dance?"

"Y-yes?" from Miss Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess, who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration than the canyons of talk-parties require.

Said Carl to Ruth, "Not that there's any dancing, but I felt you'd get dizzy if you climbed any higher in that aeroplane."

Ruth tried to look haughty, but her dark lashes went up and her unexpected blue eyes grinned at him boyishly.

"Gee! she's clever!" Carl was thinking. Since, to date, her only remark had been "Y-yes?" he may have been premature.

"That was a bully strangle hold you got on Miss Olive's hand, Miss Winslow."

"You saw our hands?"

"Perhaps.... Tell me a good way to express how superior you and I are to this fool party and its noise. Isn't it a fool party?"

"I'm afraid it really is."

"What's the purpose of it, anyway? Do the people have to come here and breathe this air, I wonder? I asked several people that, and I'm afraid they think I'm crazy."

"But you are here? Do you come to Mrs. Salisbury's often?"

"Never been before. Never seen a person here in my life before—except you and Miss Olive. Came on a bet. Chap bet I wouldn't dare come without being invited. I came. Bowed to the hostess and told her I was so sorry my play-rehearsals made me late, and she was so glad I could come, after all—you know. She's never seen me in her life."

"Oh? Are you a dramatist?"

"I was—in the other room. But I was a doctor out in the hall and a sculptor on the stairs, so I'm getting sort of confused myself—as confused as you are, trying to remember who I am, Miss Winslow. You really don't remember me at all? Tea at—wasn't it at the Vanderbilt? or the Plaza?"

"Oh yes, that must have been——I was trying to remember——"

Carl grinned. "The chap who introduced me to you called me 'Mr. Um-m-m,' because he didn't remember my name, either. So you've never heard it. It happens to be Ericson.... I'm on a mission. Serious one. I'm planning to go out and buy a medium-sized bomb and blow up this bunch. I suspect there's poets around."

"I do too," sighed Ruth. "I understand that Mrs. Salisbury always has seven lawyers and nineteen advertising men and a dentist and a poet and an explorer at her affairs. Are you the poet or the explorer?"

"I'm the dentist. I think——You don't happen to have done any authoring, do you?"

"Well, nothing except an epic poyem on Jonah and the Whale, which I wrote at the age of seven. Most of it consisted of a conversation between them, while Jonah was in the Whale's stomach, which I think showed agility on the part of the Whale."

"Then maybe it's safe to say what I think of authors—and more or less of poets and painters and so on. One time I was in charge of some mechanical investigations, and a lot of writers used to come around looking for what they called 'copy.' That's where I first got my grouch on them, and I've never really got over it; and coming here to-night and hearing the littery talk I've been thinking how these authors have a sort of an admiration trust. They make authors the heroes of their stories and so on, and so they make people think that writing is sacred. I'm so sick of reading novels about how young Bill, as had a pure white soul, came to New York and had an 'orrible time till his great novel was accepted. Authors seem to think they're the only ones that have ideals. Now I'm in the automobile business, and I help to make people get out into the country—bet a lot more of them get out because of motoring than because of reading poetry about spring. But if I claimed a temperament because I introduce the motorist's soul to the daisy, every one would die laughing."

"But don't you think that art is the—oh, the object of civilization and that sort of thing?"

"I do not! Honestly, Miss Winslow, I think it would be a good stunt to get along without any art at all for a generation, and see what we miss. We probably need dance music, but I doubt if we need opera. Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera—or war or fiction. I'd like to see all the shoemakers get together and refuse to make any more shoes till people promised to write reviews about them, like all these book-reviews. Then just as soon as people's shoes began to wear out they'd come right around, and you'd read about the new masterpieces of Mr. Regal and Mr. Walkover and Mr. Stetson."

"Yes! I can imagine it. 'This laced boot is one of the most vital and gripping and wholesome shoes of the season.' And probably all the young shoemakers would sit around cafes, looking quizzical and artistic. But don't you think your theory is dangerous, Mr. Ericson? You give me an excuse for being content with being a commonplace Upper-West-Sider. And aren't authors better than commonplaceness? You're so serious that I almost suspect you of having started to be an author yourself."

"Really not. As a matter of fact, I'm the kiddy in patched overalls you used to play with when you kept house in the willows."

"Oh, of course! In the Forest of Arden! And you had a toad that you traded for my hair-ribbon."

"And we ate bread and milk out of blue bowls!"

"Oh yes!" she agreed, "blue bowls with bunny-rabbits painted on them."

"And giants and a six-cylinder castle, with warders and a donjon keep. And Jack the Giant-killer. But certainly bunnies."

"Do you really like bunnies?" Her voice caressed the word.

"I like them so much that when I think of them I know that there's one thing worse than having a cut-rate literary salon, and that's to be too respectable——"

"Too Upper-West-Side!"

"——to dare to eat bread and milk out of blue bowls."

"Yes, I think I shall have to admit you to the Blue Bowl League, Mr. Ericson. Speaking of which——Tell me, who did introduce us, you and me? I feel so apologetic for not remembering."

"Mayn't I be a mystery, Miss Winslow? At least as long as I have this new shirt, which you observed with some approval while I was drooling on about authors? It makes me look like a count, you must admit. Or maybe like a Knight of the Order of the Bunny Rabbit. Please let me be a mystery still."

"Yes, you may. Life has no mysteries left except Olive's coiffure and your beautiful shirt.... Does one talk about shirts at a second meeting?"

"Apparently one does."

"Yes.... To-night, I must have a mystery.... Do you swear, as a man of honor, that you are at this party dishonorably, uninvited?"

"I do, princess."

"Well, so am I! Olive was invited to come, with a man, but he was called away and she dragged me here, promising me I should see——"

"Anarchists?"

"Yes! And the only nice lovable crank I've found—except you, with your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors—is a dark-eyed female who sits on a couch out in the big room, like a Mrs. St. Simeon Stylites in a tight skirt, and drags you in by her glittering eye, looking as though she was going to speak about theosophy, and then asks you if you think a highball would help her cold."

"I think I know the one you mean. When I saw her she was talking to a man whose beating whiskers dashed high on a stern and rock-bound face.... Thank you, I like that fairly well, too, but unfortunately I stole it from a chap named Haviland. My own idea of witty conversation: is 'Some car you got. What's your magneto?'"

"Look. Olive Dunleavy seems distressed. The number of questions I shall have to answer about you!... Well, Olive and I felt very low in our minds to-day. We decided that we were tired of select associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her son was doing in his Old French course at Columbia. So we got lower and lower in our minds, and we decided we had to go down to Chinatown for dinner. We went, too! I've done a little settlement work——Dear me, I'm telling you too much about myself, O Man of Mystery! It isn't quite done, I'm afraid."

"Please, Miss Winslow! In the name of the—what was it—Order of the Blue Bowl?" He was making a mental note that Olive's last name was Dunleavy.

"Well, I've done some settlement work——Did you ever do any, by any chance?"

"I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism; I think that was my nearest approach," said Carl.

"My work was the kind where you go in and look at three dirty children and teach them that they'll be happy if they're good, when you know perfectly well that their only chance to be happy is to be bad as anything and sneak off to go swimming in the East River. But it kept me from being very much afraid of the Bowery (we went down on the surface cars), but Olive was scared beautifully. There was the dearest, most inoffensive old man in the most perfect state of intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away from him he winked over at me and said, 'Honor your shruples, ma'am, ver' good form.' I think Olive thought he was going to murder us—she was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a noble race or something. But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.

"We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk, showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know—perhaps Oxford—and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?' He suggested chow-main—we thought it would be either birds' nests or rats' tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky. And he was reading The Presbyterian!... Then we came up here, and it doesn't seem so very primitive here, either. It's most aggravating.... It seems to me I've been telling you an incredible lot about our silly adventures—you're probably the man who won the Indianapolis motor-race or discovered electricity or something."

Through her narrative, her eyes had held his, but now she glanced about, noted Olive, and seemed uneasy.

"I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting," he said; "but I have wanted to see new places and new things—and I've more or less seen 'em. When I've got tired of one town, I've simply up and beat it, and when I got there—wherever there was—I've looked for a job. And——Well, I haven't lost anything by it."

"Have you really? That's the most wonderful thing to do in the world. My travels have been Cook's tours, with our own little Thomas Cook and Son right in the family—I've never even had the mad freedom of choosing between a tour of the Irish bogs and an educational pilgrimage to the shrines of celebrated brewers. My people have always chosen for me. But I've wanted——One doesn't merely go without having an objective, or an excuse for going, I suppose."

"I do," declared Carl. "But——May I be honest?"

"Yes."

Intimacy was about them. They were two travelers from a far land, come together in the midst of strangers.

"I speak of myself as globe-trotting," said Carl. "I have been. But for a good many weeks I've been here in New York, knowing scarcely any one, and restless, yet I haven't felt like hiking off, because I was sick for a time, and because a chap that was going to Brazil with me died suddenly."

"To Brazil? Exploring?"

"Yes—just a stab at it, pure amateur.... I'm not at all sure I'm just making-believe when I speak of blue bowls and so on. Tell me. In the West, one would speak of 'seeing the girls home.' How would one say that gracefully in New-Yorkese, so that I might have the chance to beguile Miss Olive Dunleavy and Miss Ruth Winslow into letting me see them home?"

"Really, we're not a bit afraid to go home alone."

"I won't tease, but——May I come to your house for tea, some time?"

She hesitated. It came out with a rush. "Yes. Do come up. N-next Sunday, if you'd like."

She bobbed her head to Olive and rose.

"And the address?" he insisted.

"—— West Ninety-second Street.... Good night. I have enjoyed the blue bowl."

Carl made his decent devoirs to his hostess and tramped up-town through the flying snow, swinging his stick like an orchestra conductor, and whistling a waltz.

As he reached home he thought again of his sordid parting with Gertie in the Park—years ago, that afternoon. But the thought had to wait in the anteroom of his mind while he rejoiced over the fact that he was to see his new playmate the coming Sunday.



CHAPTER XXIX

Like a country small boy waiting for the coming of his city cousin, who will surely have new ways of playing Indians, Carl prepared to see Ruth Winslow and her background. What was she? Who? Where? He pictured her as dwelling in everything from a millionaire's imitation chateau, with footmen and automatic elevators, to a bachelor girl's flat in an old-fashioned red-brick Harlem tenement. But more than that: What would she herself be like against that background?

Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday he was worried by finding himself unable to remember whether Ruth's hair was black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's ash-blond. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office after eating too much beefsteak and kidney pie, drinking too much coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes, at lunch with Mr. VanZile, when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and yield to drowsiness, he was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it immediately.

The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie.

At 3.30 P.M., Sunday, he was already incased in funereal morning-clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss Winslow's before five. His clothes were new, stiff as though they belonged to a wax dummy. Their lines were straight and without individuality. He hitched his shoulders about and kept going to the mirror to inspect the fit of the collar. He repeatedly re brushed his hair, regarding the unclean state of his military brushes with disgust. About six times he went to the window to see if it had started to snow.

At ten minutes to four he sternly jerked on his coat and walked far north of Ninety-second Street, then back.

He arrived at a quarter to five, but persuaded himself that this was a smarter hour of arrival than five.

Ruth Winslow's home proved to be a rather ordinary three-story-and-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New York houses by introducing a box-stoop and steps with a carved stone balustrade, at the top of which perched a meek old lion of 1890, with battered ears and a truly sensitive stone nose. A typical house of the very well-to-do yet not wealthy "upper middle class"; a house predicating one motor-car, three not expensive maids, brief European tours, and the best preparatory schools and colleges for the sons.

A maid answered the door and took his card—a maid in a frilly apron and black uniform—neither a butler nor a slatternly Biddy. In the hall, as the maid disappeared up-stairs, Carl had an impression of furnace heat and respectability. Rather shy, uncomfortable, anxious to be acceptable, warning himself that as a famous aviator he need not be in awe of any one, but finding that the warning did not completely take, he drew off his coat and gloves and, after a swift inspection of his tie, gazed about with more curiosity than he had ever given to any other house.

For all the stone lion in front, this was quite the old-line English-basement house, with the inevitable front and back parlors—though here they were modified into drawing-room and dining-room. The walls of the hall were decked with elaborate, meaningless scrolls in plaster bas-relief, echoed by raised circles on the ceiling just above the hanging chandelier, which was expensive and hideous, a clutter of brass and knobby red-and-blue glass. The floor was of hardwood in squares, dark and richly polished, highly self-respecting—a floor that assumed civic responsibility from a republican point of view, and a sound conservative business established since 1875 or 1880. By the door was a huge Japanese vase, convenient either for depositing umbrellas or falling over in the dark. Then, a long mirror in a dull-red mahogany frame, and a table of mahogany so refined that no one would ever dream of using it for anything more useful than calling-cards. It might have been the table by the king's bed, on which he leaves his crown on a little purple cushion at night. Solid and ostentatious.

The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses, making silken unreal love and scandalously neglecting silky unreal sheep. By the hearth were shiny fire-irons which looked as though they had never been used. The whole room looked as though it had never been used—except during the formal calls of overdressed matrons with card-cases and prejudices. The one human piece of furniture in the room, a couch soft and slightly worn, on which lovers might have sat and small boys bounced, was trying to appear useless, too, under its row of stiff satin cushions with gold cords.... Well-dusted chairs on which no one wished to sit; expensive fireplace that never shone; prized pictures with less imagination than the engravings on a bond—that drawing-room had the soul of a banker with side-whiskers.

Carl by no means catalogued all the details, but he did get the effect of ingrowing propriety. It is not certain that he thought the room in bad taste. It is not certain that he had any artistic taste whatever; or that his attack upon the pretensions of authors had been based on anything more fundamental than a personal irritation due to having met blatant camp-followers of the arts. And it is certain that one of his reactions as he surveyed the abject respectability of that room was a slight awe of the solidity of social position which it represented, and which he consciously lacked. But, whether from artistic instinct or from ignorance, he was sure that into the room ought to blow a sudden great wind, with the scent of forest and snow. He shook his head when the maid returned, and he followed her up-stairs. Surely a girl reared here would never run away and play with him.

He heard lively voices from the library above. He entered a room to be lived in and be happy in, with a jolly fire on the hearth and friendly people on a big, brown davenport. Ruth Winslow smiled at him from behind the Colonial silver and thin cups on the tea-table, and as he saw her light-filled eyes, saw her cock her head gaily in welcome, he was again convinced that he had found a playmate.

A sensation of being pleasantly accepted warmed him as she cried, "So glad——" and introduced him, gave him tea and a cake with nuts in it. From a wing-chair Carl searched the room and the people. There were two paintings—a pale night sea and an arching Japanese bridge under slanting rain, both imaginative and well-done. There was a mahogany escritoire, which might have been stiff but was made human by scattered papers on the great blotter and books crammed into the shelves. Other books were heaped on a table as though people had been reading them. Later he found how amazingly they were assorted—the latest novel of Robert Chambers beside H. G. Wells's First and Last Things; a dusty expensive book on Italian sculpture near a cheap reprint of Dodo.

The chairs were capacious, the piano a workmanlike upright, not dominating the room, but ready for music; and in front of the fire was an English setter, an aristocrat of a dog, with the light glittering in his slowly waving tail. The people fitted into the easy life of the room. They were New-Yorkers and, unlike over half of the population, born there, considering New York a village where one knows everybody and remembers when Fourteenth Street was the shopping-center. Olive Dunleavy was shinily present, her ash-blond hair in a new coiffure. She was arguing with a man of tight morning-clothes and a high-bred face about the merits of "Parsifal," which, Olive declared, no one ever attended except as a matter of conscience.

"Now, Georgie," she said, "issa Georgie, you shall have your opera—and you shall jolly well have it alone, too!" Olive was vivid about it all, but Carl saw that she was watching him, and he was shy as he wondered what Ruth had told her.

Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, a clear-faced, slender, well-bathed boy of twenty-six, with too high a forehead, with discontent in his face and in his thin voice, carelessly well-dressed in a soft-gray suit and an impressionistic tie, was also inspecting Carl, while talking to a pretty, commonplace, finishing-school-finished girl. Carl instantly disliked Philip Dunleavy, and was afraid of his latent sarcasm.

Indeed, Carl felt more and more that beneath the friendliness with which he was greeted there was no real welcome as yet, save possibly on the part of Ruth. He was taken on trial. He was a Mr. Ericson, not any Mr. Ericson in particular.

Ruth, while she poured tea, was laughing with a man and a girl. Carl himself was part of a hash-group—an older woman who seemed to know Rome and Paris better than New York, and might be anything from a milliner to a mondaine; a keen-looking youngster with tortoise-shell spectacles; finally, Ruth's elder brother, Mason J. Winslow, Jr., a tall, thin, solemn, intensely well-intentioned man of thirty-seven, with a long, clean-shaven face, and a long, narrow head whose growing baldness was always spoken of as a result of his hard work. Mason J. Winslow, Jr., spoke hesitatingly, worried over everything, and stood for morality and good business. He was rather dull in conversation, rather kind in manner, and accomplished solid things by unimaginatively sticking at them. He didn't understand people who did not belong to a good club.

Carl contributed a few careful platitudes to a frivolous discussion of whether it would not be advisable to solve the woman-suffrage question by taking the vote away from men and women both and conferring it on children. Mason Winslow ambled to the big table for a cigarette, and Carl pursued him. While they stood talking about "the times are bad," Carl was spying upon Ruth, and the minute her current group wandered off to the davenport he made a dash at the tea-table and got there before Olive's brother, Philip Dunleavy, who was obviously manoeuvering like himself. Philip gave him a covert "Who are you, fellow?" glance, took a cake, and retired.

From his wicker chair facing Ruth's, Carl said, gloomily, "It isn't done."

"Yes," said Ruth, "I know it, but still some very smart people are doing it this season."

"But do you think the woman that writes 'What the man will wear' in the theater programs would stand for it?"

"Not," gravely considered Ruth, "if there were black stitching on the dress-glove. Yet there is some authority for frilled shirts."

"You think it might be considered then?"

"I will not come between you and your haberdasher, Mr. Ericson."

"This is a foolish conversation. But since you think the better classes do it—gee! it's getting hard for me to keep up this kind of 'Dolly Dialogue.' What I wanted to do was to request you to give me concisely but fully a sketch of 'Who is Miss Ruth Winslow?' and save me from making any pet particular breaks. And hereafter, I warn you, I'm going to talk like my cousin, the carpet-slipper model."

"Name, Ruth Winslow. Age, between twenty and thirty. Father, Mason Winslow, manufacturing contractor for concrete. Brothers, Mason Winslow, Jr., whose poor dear head is getting somewhat bald, as you observe, and Bobby Winslow, ne'er-do-weel, who is engaged in subverting discipline at medical school, and who dances divinely. My mother died three years ago. I do nothing useful, but I play a good game of bridge and possess a voice that those as know pronounce passable. I have a speaking knowledge of French, a reading knowledge of German, and a singing knowledge of Italian. I am wearing an imported gown, for which the House of Winslow will probably never pay. I live in this house, and am Episcopalian—not so much High Church as highly infrequent church. I regard the drawing-room down-stairs as the worst example of late-Victorian abominations in my knowledge, but I shall probably never persuade father to change it because Mason thinks it is sacred to the past. My ambition in life is to be catty to the Newport set after I've married an English diplomat with a divine mustache. Never having met such a personage outside of Tatler and Vogue, I can't give you very many details regarding him. Oh yes, of course, he'll have to play a marvelous game of polo and have a chateau in Provence and also a ranch in Texas, where I shall wear riding-breeches and live next to Nature and have a Chinese cook in blue silk. I think that's my whole history. Oh, I forgot. I play at the piano and am very ignorant, and completely immersed in the worst traditions of the wealthy Micks of the Upper West Side, and I always pretend that I live here instead of on the Upper East Side because 'the air is better.'"

"What is this Upper West Side? Is it a state of mind?"

"Indeed it is not. It's a state of pocketbook. The Upper West Side is composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue. You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and haughty about people in retail. You go to Europe one summer and to the Jersey coast the next. All your clothes and parties and weddings and funerals might be described as 'elegant.' That's the Upper West Side. Now the dread truth about you.... Do you know, after the unscrupulous way in which you followed up a mere chance introduction at a tea somewhere, I suspect you to be a well-behaved young man who leads an entirely blameless life. Or else you'd never dare to jump the fence and come and play in my back yard when all the other boys politely knock at the front door and get sent home."

"Me—well, I'm a wage-slave of the VanZile Motor people, in charge of the Touricar department. Age, twenty-eight—almost. Habits, all bad.... No, I'll tell you. I'm one of those stern, silent men of granite you read about, and only my man knows the human side of me, because all the guys on Wall Street tremble in me presence."

"Yes, but then how can you belong to the Blue Bowl Sodality?"

"Um, Yes——I've got it. You must have read novels in which the stern, silent man of granite has a secret tenderness in his heart, and he keeps the band of the first cigar he ever smoked in a little safe in the wall, and the first dollar he ever made in a frame—that's me."

"Of course! The cigar was given him by his flaxen-haired sweetheart back in Jenkins Corners, and in the last chapter he goes back and marries her."

"Not always, I hope!" Of what Carl was thinking is not recorded. "Well, as a matter of fact, I've been a fairly industrious young man of granite the last few months, getting out the Touricar."

"What is a Touricar? It sounds like an island inhabited by cannibals, exports hemp and cocoanut, see pink dot on the map, nor' by nor'east of Mogador."

Carl explained.

"I'm terribly interested," said Ruth. (But she made it sound as though she really was.) "I think it's so wonderful.... I want to go off tramping through the Berkshires. I'm so tired of going to the same old places."

"Some time, when you're quite sure I'm an estimable young Y. M. C. A. man, I'm going to try to persuade you to come out for a real tramp."

She seemed to be considering the idea, not seriously, but——

Philip Dunleavy eventuated.

For some time Philip had been showing signs of interest in Ruth and Carl. Now he sauntered to the table, begged for another cup of tea, said agreeable things in regard to putting orange marmalade in tea, and calmly established himself. Ruth turned toward him.

Carl had fancied that there was, for himself, in Ruth's voice, something more friendly, in her infectious smile something more intimate than she had given the others, but when she turned precisely the same cheery expression upon Philip, Carl seemed to have lost something which he had trustingly treasured for years. He was the more forlorn as Olive Dunleavy joined them, and Ruth, Philip, and Olive discussed the engagement of one Mary Meldon. Olive recalled Miss Meldon as she had been in school days at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Philip told of her flirtations at the old Long Beach Hotel.

The names of New York people whom they had always known; the names of country clubs—Baltusrol and Meadow Brook and Peace Waters; the names of streets, with a sharp differentiation between Seventy-fourth Street and Seventy-fifth Street; Durland's Riding Academy, the Rink of a Monday morning, and other souvenirs of a New York childhood; the score of the last American polo team and the coming dances—these things shut Carl out as definitely as though he were a foreigner. He was lonely. He disliked Phil Dunleavy's sarcastic references. He wanted to run away.

Ruth seemed to realize that Carl was shut out. Said she to Phil Dunleavy: "I wish you could have seen Mr. Ericson save my life last Sunday. I had an experience."

"What was that?" asked the man whom Olive called "Georgie," joining the tea-table set.

The whole room listened as Ruth recounted the trip to Chinatown, Mrs. Salisbury's party, and the hero who had once been a passenger in an aeroplane.

Throughout she kept turning toward Carl. It seemed to reunite him to the company. As she closed, he said:

"The thing that amused me about the parlor aviator was his laying down the law that the Atlantic will be crossed before the end of 1913, and his assumption that we'll all have aeroplanes in five years. I know from my own business, the automobile business, about how much such prophecies are worth."

"Don't you think the Atlantic will be crossed soon?" asked the keen-looking man with the tortoise-shell spectacles.

Phil Dunleavy broke in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions about—either what it can or can't do."

"Oh yes," admitted Carl; and the whole room breathed. "Oh yes."

Dunleavy went on in his thin, overbred, insolent voice, "Now I have it on good authority, from a man who's a member of the Aero Club, that next year will be the greatest year aviation has ever known, and that the Wrights have an aeroplane up their sleeve with which they'll cross the Atlantic without a stop, during the spring of 1914 at the very latest."

"That's unfortunate, because the aviation game has gone up completely in this country, except for hydro-aeroplaning and military aviation, and possibly it never will come back," said Carl, a hint of pique in his voice.

"What is your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited, testing this positive-spoken outsider.

"Well," drawled Carl, "I have fairly good authority. Walter MacMonnies, for instance, and he is probably the best flier in the country to-day, except for Lincoln Beachey."

"Oh yes, he's a good flier," said Phil, contemptuously, with a shadowy smile for Ruth. "Still, he's no better than Aaron Solomons, and he isn't half so great a flier as that chap with the same surname as your own, Hawk Ericson, whom I myself saw coming up the Jersey coast when he won that big race to New York.... You see, I've been following this aviation pretty closely."

Carl saw Ruth's head drop an inch, and her eyes close to a slit as she inspected him with sudden surprise. He knew that it had just occurred to her who he was. Their eyes exchanged understanding. "She does get things," he thought, and said, lightly:

"Well, I honestly hate to take the money, Mr. Dunleavy, but I'm in a position to know that MacMonnies is a better flier to-day than Ericson is, be——"

"But see here——"

"——because I happen to be Hawk Ericson."

"What a chump I am!" groaned the man in tortoise-shell spectacles. "Of course! I remember your picture, now."

Phil was open-mouthed. Ruth laughed. The rest of the room gasped. Mason Winslow, long and bald, was worrying over the question of How to Receive Aviators at Tea.

And Carl was shy as a small boy caught stealing the jam.



CHAPTER XXX

At home, early that evening, Carl's doctor-landlord gave him the message that a Miss Gertrude Cowles had called him up, but had declined to leave a number. The landlord's look indicated that it was no fault of his if Carl had friends who were such fools that they didn't leave their numbers. Carl got even with him by going out to the corner drug-store to telephone Gertie, instead of giving him a chance to listen.

"Hello?" said Gertie over the telephone. "Oh, hello, Carl; I just called up to tell you Adelaide is going to be here this evening, and I thought perhaps you might like to come up if you haven't anything better to do."

Carl did have something better to do. He might have used the whole evening in being psychological about Ruth and Phil Dunleavy and English-basement houses with cream-colored drawing-rooms. But he went up to Gertie's.

They were all there—Gertie and Adelaide, Ray and his mother, and Miss Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi, explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they said it.

The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a cockroach with a ruler.

As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"

They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened. He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.

Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there. Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded bluff over a lake?"

"Yes!" he cried. "I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh, I was reading something the other day—fellow was trying to define the different sorts of terrain—here it is, cut it out of the paper." He produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:

"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave saints of the open; all these I love, but nowhere do I find content save on the mid-western prairie, where the light of sky and plain drugs the senses, where the sound of meadow-larks at dawn fulfils my desire for companionship, and the easy creak of the buggy, as we top rise after rise, bespells me into an afternoon slumber which the nervous town shall never know.'

"I cut the thing out because I was thinking that the prairies, stretching out the way they do, make me want to go on and on, in an aeroplane or any old thing. Lord, Lord! I guess before long I'll have to be beating it again—like the guy in Kipling that always got sick of reading the same page too long."

"Oh, but Carl, you don't mean to say you're going to give up your business, when you're doing so well? And aviation shows what you can do if you stick to a thing, Carl, and not just wander around like you used to do. We do want to see you succeed."

His reply was rather weak: "Well, gee! I guess I'll succeed, all right, but I don't see much use of succeeding if you have to be stuck down in a greasy city street all your life."

"That's very true, Carl, but do you appreciate the city? Have you ever been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or gone to a single symphony concert at Carnegie Hall?"

Carl was convinced that Gertie was a highly superior person; that she was getting far more of the good of New York than he.... He would take her to a concert, have her explain the significance of the music.

It was never to occur sharply to him that, though Gertie referred frequently to concerts and pictures, she showed no vast amount of knowledge about them. She was a fixed fact in his mind; had been for twenty years. He could have a surface quarrel with her because he knew the fundamental things in her, and with these, he was sure, no one could quarrel. His thoughts of Ruth and Olive were delightful surprises; his impression of Gertie was stable as the Rockies.

* * * * *

Carl wasn't sure whether Upper West Side young ladies could be persuaded to attend a theater party upon short acquaintance, but he tried, and arranged a party of Ruth and Olive and himself, Walter MacMonnies (in town on his way from Africa to San Diego), Charley Forbes of the Chronicle and, for chaperon, the cosmopolitan woman whom he had met at Ruth's, and who proved to be a Mrs. Tirrell, a dismayingly smart dressmaker.

When he called for Ruth he expected such a gay girl as had poured tea. He was awed to find her a grande dame in black velvet, more dignified, apparently inches taller, and in a vice-regally bad temper. As they drove off she declared:

"Sorry I'm in such a villainous temper. I hadn't a single pair of decent white gloves, and I tore some old black Spanish lace on the gown I was going to wear, and my entire family, whom God unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other horribly vulgar things."

Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes, listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was awed by the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was working, working at bringing out MacMonnies, a shy, broad-shouldered, inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk.

Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth and Olive persuaded him to take them to the cafe of the Rector's of that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway cafe, and they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off.

At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out of the Middle West. Around them was the storm of highballs and brandy and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke, shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet refuge for the eternal force of life....

Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day and be off hiking through the clouds the next?"

"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem, and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be rich. But I've been reading; and I've made—to you it may seem silly to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've ever made: that people are just people, all of them—that the little mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody—that the motorman that lets his beastly car spatter mud on my nice new velvet skirt may be exactly the same sort of person as the swain who commiserates with me in his cunnin' Harvard accent. Do you think that?"

"I know it. Most of my life I've been working with men with dirty finger-nails, and the only difference between them and the men with clean nails is a nail-cleaner, and that costs just ten cents at the corner drug-store. Seriously—I remember a cook I used to talk to on my way down to Panama once——"

("Panama! How I'd like to go there!")

"——and he had as much culture as anybody I've ever met."

"Yes, but generally do you find very much—oh, courtesy and that sort of thing among mechanics, as much as among what calls itself 'the better class'?"

"No, I don't."

"You don't? Why, I thought—the way you spoke——"

"Why, blessed, what in the world would be the use of their trying to climb if they already had all the rich have? You can't be as gracious as the man that's got nothing else to do, when you're about one jump ahead of the steam-roller every second. That's why they ought to take things. If I were a union man, I wouldn't trust all these writers and college men and so on, that try to be sympathetic. Not for one minute. They mean well, but they can't get what it means to a real workman to have to be up at five every winter morning, with no heat in the furnished housekeeping room; or to have to see his Woman sick because he can't afford a doctor."

So they talked, boy and girl, wondering together what the world really is like.

"I want to find out what we can do with life!" she said. "Surely it's something more than working to get tired, and then resting to go back to work. But I'm confused about things." She sighed. "My settlement work—I went into it because I was bored. But it did make me realize how many people are hungry. And yet we just talk and talk and talk—Olive and I sit up half the night when she comes to my house, and when we're not talking about the new negligees we're making and the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do any good to just talk?—Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right down his middle."

"I don't know. But I do know I don't want to be just stupidly satisfied, and talking does keep me from that, anyway. See here, Miss Winslow, suppose some time I suggested that we become nice and earnest and take up socialism and single tax and this—what is it?—oh, syndicalism—and really studied them, would you do it? Make each other study?"

"Love to."

"Does Dunleavy think much?"

She raised her eyebrows a bit, but hesitated. "Oh yes—no, I don't suppose he does. Or anyway, mostly about the violin. He played a lot when he was in Yale."

Thus was Carl encouraged to be fatuous, and he said, in a manner which quite dismissed Phil Dunleavy: "I don't believe he's very deep. Ra-ther light, I'd say."

Her eyebrows had ascended farther. "Do you think so? I'm sorry."

"Why sorry?"

"Oh, he's always been rather a friend of mine. Olive and Phil and I roller-skated together at the age of eight."

"But——"

"And I shall probably—marry—Phil—some day before long." She turned abruptly to Charley Forbes with a question.

Lost, already lost, was the playmate; a loss that disgusted him with life. He beat his spirit, cursed himself as a clumsy mechanic. He listened to Olive only by self-compulsion. It was minutes before he had the ability and the chance to say to Ruth:

"Forgive me—in the name of the Blue Bowl. Mr. Dunleavy was rather rude to me, and I've been just as rude—and to you! And without his excuse. For he naturally would want to protect you from a wild aviator coming from Lord knows where."

"You are forgiven. And Phil was rude. And you're not a Lord-knows-where, I'm sure."

Almost brusquely Carl demanded: "Come for a long tramp with me, on the Palisades. Next Saturday, if you can and if it's a decent day.... You said you liked to run away.... And we can be back before dinner, if you like."

"Why—let me think it over. Oh, I would like to. I've always wanted to do just that—think of it, the Palisades just opposite, and I never see them except for a walk of half a mile or so when I stay with a friend of mine, Laura Needham, at Winklehurst, up on the Palisades. My mother never approved of a wilder wilderness than Central Park and the habit——I've never been able to get Olive to explore. But it isn't conventional to go on long tramps with even the nicest new Johnnies, is it?"

"No, but——"

"I know. You'll say, 'Who makes the convention?' and of course there's no answer but 'They.' But They are so all-present. They——Oh yes, yes, yes, I will go! But you will let me get back by dinner-time, won't you? Will you call for me about two?... And can you——I wonder if a hawk out of the windy skies can understand how daring a dove out of Ninety-second Street feels at going walking on the Palisades?"



CHAPTER XXXI

The iron Hudson flowed sullenly, far below the ice-enameled rock on the Palisades, where stood Ruth and Carl, shivering in the abrupt wind that cut down the defile. The scowling, slatey river was filled with ice-floes and chunks of floating, water-drenched snow that broke up into bobbing sheets of slush. The sky was solid cold gray, with no arch and no hint of the lost sun. Crows winging above them stood out against the sky like pencil-marks on clean paper. The estates in upper New York City, across the river, were snow-cloaked, the trees chilly and naked, the houses standing out as though they were freezing and longing for their summer wrap of ivy. And naked were the rattling trees on their side of the river, on the Palisades. But the cold breeze enlivened them, the sternness of the swift, cruel river and miles of brown shore made them gravely happy. As they tramped briskly off, atop the cliffs, toward the ferry to New York, five miles away, they talked with a quiet, quick seriousness which discovered them to each other. It was too cold for conversational fencing. It was too splendidly open for them not to rejoice in the freedom from New York streets and feel like heroes conquering the miles.

Carl was telling of Joralemon, of Plato, of his first flights before country fairs; something of what it meant to be a newspaper hero, and of his loneliness as a Dethroned Prince. Ruth dropped her defenses of a chaperoned young woman; confessed that now that she had no mother to keep her mobilized and in the campaign to get nearer to "Society" and a "decent marriage," she did not know exactly what she wanted to do with life. She spoke tentatively of her vague settlement work; in all she said she revealed an honesty as forthright as though she were a gaunt-eyed fanatic instead of a lively-voiced girl in a blue corduroy jacket with collar and cuffs of civet and buttons from Venice.

Then Carl spoke of his religion—the memory of Forrest Haviland. He had never really talked of him to any one save Colonel Haviland and Titherington, the English aviator; but now this girl, who had never seen Forrest, seemed to have known him for life. Carl made vivid by his earnestness the golden hours of work together in California; the confidences in New York restaurants; his long passion for their Brazilian trip. Ruth's eyes looked up at him with swift comprehension, and there was a tear in them as he told in ten words of the message that Forrest was dead.

They turned gay, Ruth's sturdy, charming shoulders shrugging like a Frenchman's with the exhilaration of fast walking and keen air, while her voice, light and cheerful, with graceful modulations and the singer's freedom from twang, rejoiced:

"I'm so glad we came! I'm so glad we came! But I'm afraid of the wild beasts I see in the woods there. They have no right to have twilight so early. I know a big newspaper man who lives at Pompton, N. J., and I'm going to ask him to write to the governor about it. The legislature ought to pass a law that dusk sha'n't come till seven, Saturday afternoons. Do you know how glad I am that you made me come?... And how honored I am to have you tell me—Lieutenant Haviland—and the very bad Carl that lived in Joralemon?"

"It's——I'm glad——Say, gee! we'll have to hurry like the dickens if we're going to catch a ferry in time to get you home for dinner."

"I have an idea. I wonder if we dare——I have a friend, sort of a distant cousin, who married her a husband at Winklehurst, on the Palisades, not very far from the ferry. I wonder if we couldn't make her invite us both for dinner? Of course, she'll want to know all about you; but we'll be mysterious, and that will make it all the more fun, don't you think? I do want to prolong our jaunt, you see."

"I can't think of anything I'd rather do. But do you dare impose a perfectly strange man on her?"

"Oh yes, I know her so well that she's told me what kind of a tie her husband had on when he proposed."

"Let's do it!"

"A telephone! There's some shops ahead there, in that settlement. Ought to be a telephone there.... I'll make her give us a good dinner! If Laura thinks she'll get away with hash and a custard with a red cherry in it, she'd better undeceive herself."

They entered a tiny wayside shop for the sale of candy and padlocks and mittens. While Ruth telephoned to her friend, Mrs. Laura Needham, Carl bought red-and-blue and lemon-colored all-day suckers, and a sugar mouse, and a candy kitten with green ears and real whiskers. He could not but hear Ruth telephoning, and they grinned at each other like conspirators, her eyelids in little wrinkles as she tried to look wicked, her voice amazingly innocent as she talked, Carl carefully arraying his purchases before her, making the candy kitten pursue the sugar mouse round and round the telephone.

"Hello, hello! Is Mrs. Needham there?... Hello!... Oh, hel-lo, Laura dear. This is Ruth. I.... Fine. I feel fine. But chillery. Listen, Laura; I've been taking a tramp along the Palisades. Am I invited to dinner with a swain?... What?... Oh yes, I am; certainly I'm invited to dinner.... Well, my dear, go in town by all means, with my blessing; but that sha'n't prevent you from having the opportunity to enjoy being hospitable.... I don't know. What ferry do you catch?... The 7.20?... N-no, I don't think we can get there till after that, so you can go right ahead and have the Biddy get ready for us.... All right; that is good of you, dear, to force the invitation on me." She flushed as her eyes met Carl's. She continued: "But seriously, will it be too much of a tax on the Biddy if we do come? We're drefful cold, and it's a long crool way to town.... Thank you, dear. It shall be returned unto you—after not too many days.... What?... Who?... Oh, a man.... Why, yes, it might be, but I'd be twice as likely to go tramping with Olive as with Phil.... No, it isn't.... Oh, as usual. He's getting to be quite a dancing-man.... Well, if you must know—oh, I can't give you his name. He's——" She glanced at Carl appraisingly, "——he's about five feet tall, and he has a long French shovel beard and a lovely red nose, and he's listening to me describe him!"

Carl made the kitten chase the mouse furiously.

"Perhaps I'll tell you about him some time.... Good-by, Laura dear."

She turned to Carl, rubbing her cold ear where the telephone-receiver had pressed against it, and caroled: "Her husband is held late at the office, and Laura is going to meet him in town, and they're going to the theater. So we'll have the house all to ourselves. Exciting!" She swung round to telephone home that she would not be there for dinner.

As they left the shop, went over a couple of blocks for the Winklehurst trolley, and boarded it, Carl did some swift thinking. He was not above flirting or, if the opportunity offered, carrying the flirtation to the most delicious, exciting, uncertain lengths he could. Here, with "dinner in their own house," with a girl interesting yet unknown, there was a feeling of sudden intimacy which might mean anything. Only—when their joined eyes had pledged mischief while she telephoned, she had been so quiet, so frank, so evidently free from a shamefaced erotic curiosity, that now he instantly dismissed the query, "How far could I go? What does she expect?" which, outside of pure-minded romances, really does come to men. It was a wonderful relief to dismiss the query; a simplification to live in the joy each moment gave of itself. The hour was like a poem. Yet he was no extraordinary person; he had, in the lonely hours of a dead room, been tortured with the unmoral longings which, good or bad, men do feel.

As they took their seats in the car, and Ruth beat on her knees with her fur-lined gloves, he laughed back, altogether happy, not pretending, as he had pretended with Eve L'Ewysse.

Happy. But hungry!

Mrs. Needham should have been graciously absent by the time they reached her house—a suburban residence with a large porch. But, as they approached, Ruth cried:

"'Shhhh! There seems to be somebody moving around in the living room. I don't believe Laura 's gone yet. That would spoil it. Come on. Let's peep. Let's be Indian scouts!"

Cautioning each other with warning pats, they tiptoed guiltily to the side of the house and peered in at the dining-room window, where the shade was raised a couple of inches above the sill. A noise at the back of the house made them start and flatten against the wall.

"Big chief," whispered Carl, "the redskins are upon us! But old Brown Barrel shall make many an one bite the dust!"

"Hush, silly.... Oh, it's just the maid. See, she's looking at the clock and wondering why we don't get here."

"But maybe Mrs. Needham 's in the other room."

"No. Because the maid's sniffing around—there, she's reading a post-card some one left on the side-table. Oh yes, and she's chewing gum. Laura has certainly departed. Probably Laura is chewing gum herself at the present moment, now that she's out from under the eye of her maid. Laura always was ree-fined, but I wouldn't trust her to be proof against the feeling of wild dissipation you can get out of chewing gum, if you live in Winklehurst."

They had rung the door-bell on the porch by now.

"I'm so glad," said Ruth, "that Laura is gone. She is very literal-minded. She might not understand that we could be hastily married and even lease a house, this way, and still be only tea acquaintances."

The maid had not yet answered. Waiting in the still porch, winter everywhere beyond it, Carl was all excited anticipation. He hastily pressed her hand, and she lightly returned the pressure, laughing, breathing quickly. They started like convicted lovers as the maid opened the door. The consciousness of their starting made them the more embarrassed, and they stammered before the maid. Ruth fled up-stairs, while Carl tried to walk up gravely, though he was tingling with the game.

When he had washed (discovering, as every one newly discovers after every long, chilly walk, that water from the cold tap feels amazingly warm on hands congealed by the tramp), and was loitering in the upper hall, Ruth called to him from Mrs. Needham's room:

"I think you'll find hair-brushes and things in Jack's room, to the right. Oh, I am very stupid; I forgot this was our house; I mean in your room, of course."

He had a glimpse of her, twisting up a strand of naturally wavy brown hair, a silver-backed hair-brush bright against it, her cheeks flushed to an even crimson, her blue corduroy jacket off, and, warmly intimate in its stead, a blouse of blue satin, opening in a shallow triangle at her throat. With a tender big-brotherliness he sought the room that was his, not Jack's. No longer was this the house of Other People, but one in which he belonged.

"No," he heard himself explain, "she isn't beautiful. Istra Nash was nearer that. But, golly! she is such a good pal, and she is beautiful if an English lane is. Oh, stop rambling.... If I could kiss that little honey place at the base of her throat...."

"Yes, Miss Winslow. Coming. Am I ready for dinner? Watch me!"

She confided as he came out into the hall, "Isn't it terribly confusing to have our home and even three toby-children all ready-made for us, this way!"

Her glance—eyes that always startled him with blue where dark-brown was expected; even teeth showing; head cocked sidelong; cheeks burning with fire of December snow—her glance and all her manner trusted him, the outlaw. It was not as an outsider, but as her comrade that he answered:

"Golly! have we a family, too? I always forget. So sorry. But you know—get so busy at the office——"

"Why, I think we have one. I'll go look in the nursery and make sure, but I'm almost positive——"

"No, I'll take your word for it. You're around the house more than I am.... But, oh, say, speaking of that, that reminds me: Woman, if you think that I'm going to buy you a washing-machine this year, when I've already bought you a napkin-ring and a portrait of Martha Washington——"

"Oh weh! I knew I should have a cruel husband who——Joy! I think the maid is prowling about and trying to listen. 'Shhh! The story Laura will get out of her!"

While the maid served dinner, there could scarce have been a more severely correct pair, though Carl did step on her toe when she was saying to the maid, in her best offhand manner, "Oh, Leah, will you please tell Mrs. Needham that I stole a handkerchief from my—I mean from her room?"

But when the maid had been unable to find any more imaginary crumbs to brush off the table, and had left them alone with their hearts and the dessert, a most rowdy young "married couple" quarreled violently over the washing-machine he still refused to buy for her.

Carl insisted that, as suburbanites, they had to play cards, and he taught her pinochle, which he had learned from the bartender of the Bowery saloon. But the cards dropped from their fingers, and they sat before the gas-log in the living-room, in a lazy, perfect happiness, when she said:

"All the while we've been playing cards—and playing the still more dangerous game of being married—I've been thinking how glad I am to know about your life. Somehow——I wonder if you have told so very many?"

"Practically no one."

"I do——I'm really not fishing for compliments, but I do want to be found understanding——"

"There's never been any one so understanding."

Silent then. Carl glanced about the modern room. Ruth's eyes followed. She nodded as he said:

"But it's really an old farm-house out in the hills where the snow is deep; and there's logs in the fireplace."

"Yes, and rag carpets."

"And, oh, Ruth, listen, a bob-sled with——Golly! I suppose it is a little premature to call you 'Ruth,' but after our being married all evening I don't see how I can call you 'Miss Winslow.'"

"No, I'm afraid it would scarcely be proper, under the circumstances. Then I must be 'Mrs. Ericson.' Ooh! It makes me think of Norse galleys and northern seas. Of course—your galley was the aeroplane.... 'Mrs. Eric——'" Her voice ran down; she flushed and said, defensively: "What time is it? I think we must be starting. I telephoned I would be home by ten." Her tone was conventional as her words.

But as they stood waiting for a trolley-car to the New York ferry, on a street corner transformed by an arc-light that swung in the wind and cast wavering films of radiance among the vague wintry trees of a wood-lot, Ruth tucked her arm under his, small beside his great ulster, and sighed like a child:

"I am ver-ee cold!"

He rubbed her hand protectingly, her mouselike hand in its fur-lined glove. His canny, self-defensive, Scotchlike Norse soul opened its gates. He knew a longing to give, a passion to protect her, a whelming desire to have shy secrets with this slim girl. All the poetry in the world sounded its silver harps within him because his eyes were opened and it was given to him to see her face. Gently he said:

"Yes, it's cold, and there's big gray ghosts hiding there in the trees, with their leathery wings, that were made out of sea-fog by the witches, folded in front of them, and they're glumming at us over the bony, knobly joints on top their wings, with big, round platter eyes. And the wind is calling us—it's trying to snatch us out on the arctic snow-fields, to freeze us. But I'll fight them all off. I won't let them take you, Ruth."

"I'm sure you won't, Carl."

"And—oh—you won't let Phil Dunleavy keep you from running away, not for a while yet?"

"M-maybe not."

The sky had cleared. She tilted up her chin and adored the stars—stars like the hard, cold, fighting sparks that fly from a trolley-wire. Carl looked down fondly, noting how fair-skinned was her forehead in contrast to her thick, dark brows, as the arc-light's brilliance rested on her worshiping face—her lips a-tremble and slightly parted. She raised her arms, her fingers wide-spread, praising the star-gods. She cried only, "Oh, all this——" but it was a prayer to a greater god Pan, shaking his snow-incrusted beard to the roar of northern music. To Carl her cry seemed to pledge faith in the starred sky and the long trail and a glorious restlessness that by a dead fireplace of white, smooth marble would never find content.

"Like sword-points, those stars are," he said, then——

Then they heard the trolley-car's flat wheels grinding on a curve. Its search-light changed the shadow-haunted woodland to a sad group of scanty trees, huddling in front of an old bill-board, with its top broken and the tattered posters flapping. The wanderers stepped from the mystical romance of the open night into the exceeding realism of the car—highly realistic wooden floor with small, muddy pools from lumps of dirty melting snow, hot air, a smell of Italian workmen, a German conductor with the sniffles, a row of shoes mostly wet and all wrinkled. They had to stand. Most realistic of all, they read the glossy car-signs advertising soap and little cigars, and the enterprising local advertisement of "Wm. P. Smith & Sons, All Northern New Jersey Real Estate, Cheaper Than Rent." So, instantly, the children of the night turned into two sophisticated young New-Yorkers who, apologizing for fresh-air yawns, talked of the theatrical season.

But for a moment a strange look of distance dwelt in Ruth's eyes, and she said: "I wonder what I can do with the winter stars we've found? Will Ninety-second Street be big enough for them?"



CHAPTER XXXII

For a week—the week before Christmas—Carl had seen neither Ruth nor Gertie; but of the office he had seen too much. They were "rushing work" on the Touricar to have it on the market early in 1913. Every afternoon or evening he left the office with his tongue scaly from too much nervous smoking; poked dully about the streets, not much desiring to go any place, nor to watch the crowds, after all the curiosity had been drawn out of him by hours of work. Several times he went to a super-movie, a cinema palace on Broadway above Seventy-second Street, with an entrance in New York Colonial architecture, and crowds of well-to-do Jewish girls in opera-cloaks.

On the two bright mornings of the week he wanted to play truant from the office, to be off with Ruth over the hills and far away. Both mornings there came to him a picture of Gertie, wanting to slip out and play like Ruth, but having no chance. He felt guilty because he had never bidden Gertie come tramping, and guiltily he recalled that it was with her that the boy Carl had gone to seek-our-fortunes. He told himself that he had been depending upon Gertie for the bread-and-butter of friendship, and begging for the opportunity to give the stranger, Ruth Winslow, dainties of which she already had too much.

When he called, Sunday evening, he found Gertie alone, reading a love-story in a woman's magazine.

"I'm so glad you came," she said. "I was getting quite lonely." She was as gratefully casual as ever.

"Say, Gertie, I've got a plan. Wouldn't you like to go for some good long hikes in the country?"

"Oh yes; that would be fine when spring comes."

"No; I mean now, in the winter."

She looked at him heavily. "Why, isn't it pretty cold, don't you think?"

He prepared to argue, but he did not think of her as looking heavily. He did not draw swift comparisons between Gertie's immobility and Ruth's lightness. He was used to Gertie; was in her presence comfortably understanding and understood; could find whatever he expected in her as easily as one finds the editorial page—or the sporting page—in a familiar newspaper. He merely became mildly contentious and made questioning noises in his throat as she went on:

"You know it is pretty cold here. They can say all they want to about the cold and all that out in Minnesota, but, really, the humidity——"

"Rats; it isn't so very cold, not if you walk fast."

"Well, maybe; anyway, I guess it would be nice to explore some."

"All right; let's."

"I do think people are so conventional. Don't you?" said Gertie, while Carl discerningly stole one of Ray's best cigars out of the humidor. "Awfully conventional. Not going out for good long walks. Dorothy Gibbons and I did find the nicest place to walk, up in Bronx Park, and there's such a dear little restaurant, right on the water; of course the water was frozen, but it seemed quite wild, you know, for New York. We might take that walk, whenever you'd like to."

"Oh—Bronx Park—gee! Gertie, I can't get up much excitement over that. I want to get away from this tame city, and forget all about offices and parks and people and everything like that."

"N-n-n-now!" she clucked in a patronizing way. "We mustn't ask New York to give us wilderness, you know! I'm afraid that would be a little too much to ask of it! Don't you think so yourself!"

Carl groaned to himself, "I won't be mothered!"

He was silent. His silence was positively noisy. He wanted her to hear it. But it is difficult to be sulky with a bland, plump woman of thirty who remembers your childhood trick of biting your nails, and glances up at you from her embroidery, occasionally patting her brown silk hair or smoothing her brown silk waist in a way which implies a good digestion, a perfect memory of the morning's lesson of her Sunday-school class, and a mild disbelief in men as anything except relatives, providers, card-players, and nurslings. Carl gave up the silence-cure.

He hummed about the room, running over the advertising pages of magazines, discussing Plato fraternities, and waiting till it should be time to go home. Their conversation kept returning to the fraternities. There wasn't much else to talk about. Before to-night they had done complete justice to all other topics—Joralemon, Bennie Rusk, Joe Jordan's engagement, Adelaide Benner, and symphony concerts. Gertie embroidered, patted her hair, smoothed her waist, looked cheerful, rocked, and spoke; embroidered, patted her hair, smoothed her sleeve, looked amiable, rocked, and spoke—embroidered, pat——

At a quarter to ten Carl gave himself permission to go. Said he: "I'll have to get on the job pretty early to-morrow. Not much taking it easy here in New York, the way you can in Joralemon, eh? So I guess I'd better——"

"I'm sorry you have to go so early." Gertie carefully stuck her embroidery needle into her doily, rolled up the doily meticulously, laid it down on the center-table, straightened the pile of magazines which Carl had deranged, and rose. "But I'm glad you could drop up this evening. Come up any time you haven't anything better to do. Oh—what about our tramp? If you know some place that is better than Bronx Park, we might try it."

"Why—uh—yes—why, sure; we'll have to, some time."

"And, Carl, you're coming up to have your Christmas turkey with us, aren't you?"

"I'd like to, a lot, but darn it, I've accepted 'nother invitation."

That was absolutely untrue, and Carl was wondering why he had lied, when the storm broke.

Gertie's right arm, affectedly held out from the elbow, the hand drooping, in the attitude of a refined hostess saying good-by, dropped stiffly to her side. Slowly she thrust out both arms, shoulder-high on either side, with her fists clenched; her head back and slightly on one side; her lips open in agony—the position of crucifixion. Her eyes looked up, unseeing; then closed tight. She drew a long breath, like a sigh that was too weary for sound, and her plump, placid left hand clutched her panting breast, while her right arm dropped again. All the passion of tragedy seemed to shriek in her hopeless gesture, and her silence was a wail muffled and despairing.

Carl stared, twisting his watch-chain with nervous fingers, wanting to flee.

It was raw woman, with all the proprieties of Joralemon and St. Orgul's cut away, who spoke, her voice constantly rising:

"Oh, Carl—Carl! Oh, why, why, why! Oh, why don't you want me to go walking with you, now? Why don't you want to go anywhere with me any more? Have I displeased you? Oh, I didn't mean to! Why do I bore you so?"

"Oh—Gertie—oh—gee!—thunder!" whimpered a dismayed youth. A more mature Hawk Ericson struggled to life and soothed her: "Gertie, honey, I didn't mean——Listen——"

But she moaned on, standing rigid, her left hand on her breast, her eyes red, moist, frightened, fixed: "We always played together, and I thought here in the city we could be such good friends, with all the different new things to do together—why, I wanted us to go to Chinatown and theaters, and I would have been so glad to pay my share. I've just been waiting and hoping you would ask me, and I wanted us to play and see—oh! so many different new things together—it would have been so sweet, so sweet——We were good friends at first, and then you—you didn't want to come here any more and——Oh, I couldn't help seeing it; more and more and more and more I've been seeing it; but I didn't want to see it; but now I can't fool myself any more. I was so lonely till you came to-night, and when you spoke about tramping——And then it seemed like you just went away from me again."

"Why, Gertie, you didn't seem——"

"——and long ago I really saw it, the day we walked in the Park and I was wicked about trying to make you call me 'Eltruda'—oh, Carl dear, indeed you needn't call me that or anything you don't like—and I tried to make you say I had a temperament. And about Adelaide and all. And you went away and I thought you would come back to me that evening—oh, I wanted you to come, so much, and you didn't even 'phone—and I waited up till after midnight, hoping you would 'phone, I kept thinking surely you would, and you never did, you never did; and I listened and listened for the 'phone to ring, and every time there was a noise——But it never was you. It never rang at all...."

She dropped back in the Morris chair, her eyes against the cushion, her hair disordered, both her hands gripping the left arm of the chair, her sobs throat-catching and long—throb-throb-throb in the death-still air.

Carl stared at her, praying for a chance to escape. Then he felt an instinct prompting him to sob with her. Pity, embarrassment, disgust, mingled with his alarm. He became amazed that Gertie, easy-going Gertie Cowles, had any passion at all; and indignant that it was visited upon himself.

But he had to help. He moved to her chair and, squatting boyishly on its arm, stroked her hair, begging: "Gertie, Gertie, I did mean to come up, that night. Indeed I did, honey. I would have come up, but I met some friends—couldn't break away from them all evening." A chill ran between his shoulder-blades. It was a shock to the pride he took in Ruth's existence. The evening in question had found Ruth for him! It seemed as though Gertie had dared with shrewish shrillness to intrude upon his beautiful hour. But pity came to him again. Stroking her hair, he went urgently on: "Don't you see? Why, blessed, I wouldn't hurt you for anything! Just to-night—why, you remember, first thing, I wanted us to plan for some walks; reason I didn't say more about it was, I didn't know as you'd want to, much. Why, Gertie, anybody would be proud to play with you. You know so much about concerts and all sorts of stuff. Anybody'd be proud to!" He wound up with a fictitious cheerfulness. "We'll have some good long hikes together, heh?... It's better now, isn't it, kiddy? You're just tired to-night. Has something been worrying you? Tell old Carl all about—-"

She wiped her tears away with the adorable gesture of a child trying to be good, and like a child's was her glance, bewildered, hurt, yet trusting, as she said in a small, shy voice: "Would folks really be proud to play with me?... We did use to have some dear times, didn't we! Do you remember how we found some fool's gold, and we thought it was gold and hid it on the shore of the lake, and we were going to buy a ship? Do you remember? You haven't forgotten all our good times, while you've been so famous, have you?"

"Oh no, no!"

"But why don't—Carl, why don't you—why can't you care more now?"

"Why, I do care! You're one of the bulliest pals I have, you and Ray."

"And Ray!"

She flung his hand away and sat bolt up, angry.

Carl retired to a chair beside the Morris chair, fidgeting. "Can you beat it! Is this Gertie and me?" he inquired in a parenthesis in his heart. For a second, as she stared haughtily at him, he spitefully recalled the fact that Gertie had once discarded him for a glee-club dentist. But he submerged the thought and listened with a rather forced big-brother air as she repented of her anger and went on:

"Carl, don't you understand how hard it is for a woman to forget her pride this way?" The hauteur of being one of the elite of Joralemon again flashed out. "Maybe if you'll think real hard you'll remember I used to could get you to be so kind and talk to me without having to beg you so hard. Why, I'd been to New York and known the nicest people before you'd ever stirred a foot out of Joralemon! You were——Oh, please forgive me, Carl; I didn't mean to be snippy; I just don't know what to think of myself—and I did used to think I was a lady, and here I am practically up and telling you and——"

She leaned from her chair toward his, and took his hand, touching it, finding its hard, bony places and the delicate white hollows of flesh between his coarsened yet shapely fingers; tracing a scarce-seen vein on the back; exploring a well-beloved yet ill-known country. Carl was unspeakably disconcerted. He was thinking that, to him, Gertie was set aside from the number of women who could appeal physically, quite as positively as though she were some old aunt who had for twenty years seemed to be the same adult, plump, uninteresting age. Gertie's solid flesh, the monotony of her voice, the unimaginative fixity of her round cheeks, a certain increasing slackness about her waist, even the faint, stuffy domestic scent of her—they all expressed to him her lack of humor and fancy and venturesomeness. She was crystallized in his mind as a good friend with a plain soul and sisterly tendencies. Awkwardly he said:

"You mustn't talk like that.... Gee! Gertie, we'll be in a regular 'scene,' if you don't watch out!... We're just good friends, and you can always bank on me, same as I would on you."

"But why must we be just friends?"

He wanted to be rude, but he was patient. Mechanically stroking her hair again, leaning forward most uncomfortably from his chair, he stammered: "Oh, I've been——Oh, you know; I've wandered around so much that it's kind of put me out of touch with even my best friends, and I don't know where I'm at. I couldn't make any alliances——Gee! that sounds affected. I mean: I've got to sort of start in now all over, finding where I'm at."

"But why must we be just friends, then?"

"Listen, child. It's hard to tell; I guess I didn't know till now what it does mean, but there's a girl——Wait; listen. There's a girl—at first I simply thought it was good fun to know her, but now, Lord! Gertie, you'd think I was pretty sentimental if I told you what I think of her. God! I want to see her so much! Right now! I haven't let myself know how much I wanted her. She's everything. She's sister and chum and wife and everything."

"It's——But I am glad for you. Will you believe that? And perhaps you understand how I felt, now. I'm very sorry I let myself go. I hope you will——Oh, please go now."

He sprang up, only too ready to go. But first he kissed her hand with a courtly reverence, and said, with a sweetness new to him: "Dear, will you forgive me if I've ever hurt you? And will you believe how very, very much I honor you? And when I see you again there won't be—we'll both forget all about to-night, won't we? We'll just be the old Carl and Gertie again. Tell me to come when——"

"Yes. I will. Goodnight."

"Good night, Gertie. God bless you."

* * * * *

He never remembered where he walked that night when he had left Gertie. The exercise, the chill of the night, gradually set his numbed mind working again. But it dwelt with Ruth, not with Gertie. Now that he had given words to his longing for Ruth, to his pride in her, he understood that he had passed the hidden border of that misty land called "being in love," which cartographers have variously described as a fruitful tract of comfortable harvests, as a labyrinth with walls of rose and silver, and as a tenebrous realm of unhappy ghosts.

He stopped at a street corner where, above a saloon with a large beer-sign, stretched dim tenement windows toward a dirty sky; and on that drab corner glowed for a moment the mystic light of the Rose of All the World—before a Tammany saloon! Chin high, yearning toward a girl somewhere off to the south, Carl poignantly recalled how Ruth had worshiped the stars. His soul soared, lark and hawk in one, triumphant over the matter-of-factness of daily life. Carl Ericson the mechanic, standing in front of a saloon, with a laundry to one side and a cigars-and-stationery shop round the corner, was one with the young priest saying mass, one with the suffragist woman defying a jeering mob, one with Ruth Winslow listening to the ringing stars.

"God—help—me—to—be—worthy—of—her!"

Nothing more did he say, in words, yet he was changed for ever.

Changed. True that when he got home, half an hour later, and in the dark ran his nose against an opened door, he said, "Damn it!" very naturally. True that on Monday, back in the office that awaits its victims equally after Sundays golden or dreary, he forgot Ruth's existence for hours at a time. True that at lunch with two VanZile automobile salesmen he ate Wiener Schnitzel and shot dice for cigars, with no signs of a mystic change. It is even true that, dining at the Brevoort with Charley Forbes, he though of Istra Nash, and for a minute was lonely for Istra's artistic dissipation. Yet the change was there.



CHAPTER XXXIII

From Titherington, the aviator, in his Devonshire home, from a millionaire amateur flier among the orange-groves at Pasadena, from his carpenter father in Joralemon, and from Gertie in New York, Carl had invitations for Christmas, but none that he could accept. VanZile had said, pleasantly, "Going out to the country for Christmas?"

"Yes," Cal had lied.

Again he saw himself as the Dethroned Prince, and remembered that one year ago, sailing for South America to fly with Tony Bean, he had been the lion at a Christmas party on shipboard, while Martin Dockerill, his mechanic, had been a friendly slave.

He spent most of Christmas Eve alone in his room, turning over old letters, and aviation magazines with pictures of Hawk Ericson, wondering whether he might not go back to that lost world. Josiah Bagby, Jr., son of the eccentric doctor at whose school Carl had learned to fly, was experimenting with hydroaeroplanes and with bomb-dropping devices at Palm Beach, and imploring Carl, as the steadiest pilot in America, to join him. The dully noiseless room echoed the music of a steady motor carrying him out over a blue bay. Carl's own answer to the tempter vision was: "Rats! I can't very well leave the Touricar now, and I don't know as I've got my flying nerve back yet. Besides, Ruth——"

Always he thought of Ruth, uneasy with the desire to be out dancing, laughing, playing with her. He was tormented by a question he had been threshing out for days: Might he permissibly have sent her a Christmas present?

He went to bed at ten o'clock—on Christmas Eve, when the streets were surging with voices and gay steps, when rollicking piano-tunes from across the street penetrated even closed windows, and a German voice as rich as milk chocolate was caressing, "Oh Tannenbaum, oh Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deine Blaetter."... Then slept for nine hours, woke with rapturous remembrance that he didn't have to go to the office, and sang "The Banks of the Saskatchewan" in his bath. When he returned to the house, after breakfast, he found a letter from Ruth:

The Day before Xmas & all thru the Mansion The Maids with Turkey are Stirring—Please Pardon the Scansion.

DEAR PLAYMATE,—You said on our tramp that I would make a good playmate, but I'm sure that I should be a very poor one if I did not wish you a gloriously merry Xmas & a New Year that will bring you all the dear things you want. I shall be glad if you do not get this letter on Xmas day itself if that means that you are off at some charming country house having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled, probably not) time. But if by any chance you are in town, won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm little slippers from

RUTH GAYLORD WINSLOW.

P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden, with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa goldfish in a pool!

MISS R. WINSLOW.

"'——all the dear things I want'!" Carl repeated, standing tranced in the hall, oblivious of the doctor-landlord snooping at the back. "Ruth blessed, do you know the thing I want most?... Say! Great! I'll hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Or, no. I've got it." He was already out of the house, hastening toward the subway. "I'll send her one of these lingerie tea-baskets with all kinds of baby pots of preserves and tea-balls and stuff.... Wonder what Dunleavy sent her?... Rats! I don't care. Jiminy! I'm happy! Me to Palm Beach to fly? Not a chance!"

He had Christmas dinner in state, with the California Exiles Club. He was craftily careless about the manner in which he touched a letter in his pocket for gloves, which tailors have been inspired to put on the left side of dress-clothes.

* * * * *

Twice Carl called at Ruth's in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs. Florence Barclay—needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white tango-dancing backs. As for her, Ruth announced, she was going to be mid-Victorian just as soon as she could find a hair-locket, silk mitts, and an elderly female tortoise-shell cat with an instinctive sense of delicacy. She sat bolt-upright on the front of the most impersonal French-gilt chair in the drawing-room and asserted that Phil Dunleavy, with his safe ancestry of two generations of wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still another generation, was her ideal of a Christian gentleman. She wore a full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth, silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered her poise of a vicarage, remarking, "I have been subject to very careless influences lately." She called him neither "Carl" nor "Mr. Ericson" nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth.

He went home in bewilderment. As he crossed Broadway he loitered insolently, as though challenging the flying squadron of taxicabs to run him down. "What do I care if they hit me?" he inquired, savagely, of his sympathetic and applauding self. Every word she had said he examined, finding double and triple meanings, warning himself not to regard her mood seriously, but unable to make the warning take.

On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the library, read extracts from Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels; turned companionably serious, and told him how divided were her sympathies between her father—the conscientiously worried employer—and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a fantastic percolator, and played Debussy and ragtime. At ten-thirty, the hour at which he had vehemently resolved to go, they were curled in two big chairs eating chocolate peppermints and talking of themselves apropos of astronomy and the Touricar and Lincoln Beachey's daring and Mason Winslow and patriotism and Joralemon. Ruth's father drifted in from his club at a quarter to eleven. Carl now met him for the first time. He was a large-stomached, bald, sober, friendly man, with a Gladstone collar, a huge watch-chain, kindly trousers and painfully smart tan boots, a father of the kind who gives cigars and non-committal encouragement to daughter's suitors.