Chapter 1

( Originally Published 1915 )

HILDA WILSON MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF ADELE RAINEY, OF HARPER AND RAINEY; AND ALSO OF ONE BLINK MORAN, WHOM YOU WOULD HARDLY EXPECT TO BE DIGNIFIED

ONCE in the taxi, she took the little oval mirror from her wrist-bag and studied the grayish, faintly wrinkled half moons under her eyes.

"'Color's off, too," she mused. "It's all wrong, Hilda Wilson. You're not there ! You certainly are not there!"

The taxi whirled into the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle and darted westward, twisting and skidding with that nonchalant disregard of all living things that contributes in no small measure to the desperate gaiety of Paris streets; but Miss Wilson gave not a thought to the spectacle. The thousands of masculine pedestrians, with their sedulously kept beards, their flapping trousers, and (here and there) their monocles, moved slowly along the sidewalks under the bare trees and studied the thousands of women with the casual boldness of ancient habit; but for Miss Wilson they did not exist. The café waiters, blue and cold in their indoor garments and white aprons, hovered among the outdoor tables, keeping close to the charcoal braziers and the patches of winter sunlight; the cinemas blazed their white fronts; the curb kiosks flared their provocative jumble of advertisements; a battalion of cuirassiers rode by, helmet plumes waving and breastplates glinting; a motor-bus collided with the tricycle of an epicerie boy, and blocked all traffic for nearly a minute : Miss Wilson was aware only of that tired face.

She locked her fingers tightly in her lap. Then, suddenly aware that her nerves were absurdly tense, she unclasped her hands and let them drop by her sides.

"To think," she said aloud, in the crisp slang of the store that was always amusing and usually expressive, "that that harmless old rubber stamp could"—she hesitated, then came down, with a self-conscious little grimace, on the phrase—"could get my goat like that !"

During eight consecutive winters and eight consecutive summers Hilda Wilson had spent a fortnight to three weeks at Paris, buying model gowns, wraps, suits and blouses. Naturally her business headquarters had always been with Armandeville et Cie., in the Rue d'Hauteville, for these gentlemen were the traditional Paris commissionnaires for the Hartman store. Naturally, too, old M. Armandeville himself, during these four to six weeks of eight consecutive years had tried elaborately and, at times, rather laboriously to introduce a personal note into their business relationship. Beyond an instinctive repugnance to the awkward fact that men will persist in making themselves—well, difficult, at times, she had never before given him more than a passing thought. Indeed she had considered him, because of his Gallic elaborateness, rather easier to forestall than the more reticent, subtler men of America.

But now . . . ! She had certainly upset things.

And she was running away. After what she had said it was really impossible to stay on in that office. For the rest of the afternoon, anyway.

A picture of the old gentleman's face came to her mind's eye—sitting there, so frankly bewildered, so ingenuously grieved, while she stood over him, flushed and angry, reminding him of his family as well as of the advantage he was taking of herself. She might quite as well have talked the ethical system of the Choctaws. She wondered, with an oddly cold detachment of mind, what had become of her poise and her humor. Her vigor was still evident. No doubt about that. But she had lost control of it at last, after all the annoying little warnings of the last year or so that just this thing might some day happen. This was the day, it appeared.

The taxi crossed the Place de l'Opera and turned to the right along the wide Rue Auber. At the next corner it swung in to the curb before the offices of the American Express Company—that familiar "11 Rue Scribe" through which, during a long generation, have drifted so many thousands of wandering Americans.

She went directly up the stairs to the big mail room; called for her letters at the "M to Z" window; then dropped into the nearest unoccupied chair. She simply did not see, with any inner eye, the half a hundred other persons scattered about at the two-sided writing tables and in the easy chairs by the windows; indeed she was only dimly conscious of the man opposite when she had seated herself.

Miss Wilson drew off her gloves, and went at her letters. One, addressed in her mother's hand and with the familiar Indiana postmark, she put in her bag for later attention.

Another, also addressed in longhand, she pursed her lips over; then laid it aside. The business letters claimed her attention first. She ran through the little heap of envelopes with quick eyes and nimble fingers.

Then she paused, frowned slightly, and for a moment held her hand against the back of her head; then brought it down to her chest, pressed it there, and drew a long breath. She had expended a good deal of emotional energy in that foolish little scene with M. Armande vine. She realized this now. And she knew that it was energy wasted.

Her eyes rested on the man across the table. He looked up, too. He had a square strong face, with heavy bunches of muscle on each jaw and rather high cheek-bones. His brown hair came down over his forehead in a rebellious thatch. There was a slight twist in his nose, as if it had been broken. The eyes were large, and of a steady blue, unusually attractive eyes ; but one eyelid had been cut at some time, precisely in the middle, and stitched so that it was now drawn up in a permanent and faintly grotesque suggestion of a Gothic arch. A curious face and head; but solid and strong. Made you wonder a little what he could be. He was young, certainly not much over thirty, if that. His blue serge suit had been made by a good tailor—an English tailor, she thought. Over a chair beside him lay a long overcoat of broadcloth heavily lined with sable.

The top letter was from Joe Hemstead, typed under the familiar head of the Hartman store (of recent years she had made a point of having her personal mail sent here and not to M. Armandeville's office). She read this first; then sat motionless considering it, pursing her lips as she had over the unopened envelope that lay at her elbow, and slightly tapping the big blotter.

A young woman came up and whispered to the odd-looking man. He promptly gave her his seat and went away, getting into his overcoat as he passed out the door.

The girl dropped a muff and stole of imitation ermine on the chair and began a letter, writing hurriedly.

Miss Wilson looked at the furs. A smile flickered about the corners of her mouth and brightened her' eyes as she indulged in a mental "Meaow !" Then her face sobered. She reached for her pen and wrote as follows, in a strong slanting hand :

"DEAR MR. HEMSTEAD: Your letter of the seventh has just come. I fully appreciate the consideration in your suggestion, but I do feel some chagrin at the thought that others have noted my condition. It is only within the last few weeks that I've fully realized it myself. I seem to be getting about three hours' sleep a night. And my head has taken to aching, in the back. I lost my temper to-day. Don't know when I've done such a thing. I see now that I should have taken that solid month off last summer, when you wanted me to.

"But I really don't feel that I can take it now. One reason is—I see I've got to face this—that when I do stop it may take more than a month to make me fit again. Another is that May Isbell, while she is taking hold better every day, isn't quite ready yet to carry responsibility. I don't dare load it on her now—not with the spring business just ready to hit us.

"So she and I will sail for home on the 25th or 26th. I will cable date and steamer some days before this reaches you. For the present she is down at Nice and Monte Carlo studying the fashions. I am impressing on her the importance of keeping close to the real centers. She will come up via Calais and meet me at London. We are not making Berlin this trip. I sent you a letter last night reporting on business matters.

"The week on the ocean will tone me up well enough for the present. And I promise you to let go the minute the spring business begins to slacken.

"And now regarding Stanley Aitcheson. I'm sorry you had to know about it. But of course, if he broke out like that to Mr. Martin, it had to come up to you. You ask if he has made me any trouble. Well—no. Not what you would call trouble. I'll tell you just what I think it is. He's really a bit of genius. You know he can say in six words what Sumner and Deal's man needs sixty for. We've never had an advertising man who was so quick to catch the talking points of the merchandise, especially with these feminine things, or who could so consistently write the stuff that pulls the crowd. I don't know but what he is entitled to a little burst of 'temperament' now and then. He is young and imaginative, and this infatuation seems to have mixed him all up for the time.

"I hope you won't think it necessary to do anything about it. Give him a little time. In the meanwhile, I think I can handle it.

"Do you mind my sending this to your club address instead of the office ? It is rather personal

"Sincerely,

"HILDA WILSON."

She read this letter over twice, very slowly; and knit her brows. There were two or three things about it that felt distinctly wrong; her judgment, usually automatic in all personal as in business relationships, was unmistakably shaky today.

She knew Joe Hemstead pretty well; and she knew he would not like the idea of her coming back and trying to work after her own admission that she did not feel equal to it. No, he wouldn't like that. He would begin from that moment to doubt if she was, after all, big enough for her job. That was just the point with Joe Hemstead. His confidence in you was a stimulus day in and day out; but you had to go right on earning that confidence, all the time.

Then there was this disturbing affair of Stanley Aitcheson. She was inclined to think she was saying too much about him. Besides, she was taking a position in the matter before considering all the facts—there lay Stanley's letter at her elbow, unopened. She didn't want to open it.

She had thought to shake off her curiously unsettling mood by dashing away from M. Armandeville's office into the open air. But now that mood was strengthening its grip on her. It was becoming a real depression, a sinking feeling—as if the bottom had all at once dropped out of life. The absurdity of this sensation was obvious. It was the particular sort of weakness with which she had no patience. She set her will against it; but it grew, a creeping paralysis of the spirit. She began to realize that she definitely dreaded going back and plunging into the spring rush. You had to drive so. It took so much out of you.

"But then," she mused, "we have to do a good many things in this life that we don't want to do."

After which she rested her cheek on her hand and gazed down, very soberly, at the little pile of letters. It is not so easy to talk down one's own misgivings.

Then she realized that some one was speaking to her—the girl across the table.

"I beg pardon," said Miss Wilson.

The girl's voice faltered shyly as she repeated—"How do you spell pasteurized?"

Miss Wilson started to reply, hesitated, and laughed a little. "If you hadn't asked me so quickly—it's—oh, yes, of course." And she spelled it out.

The girl wrote it down; then looked up again. "I never was any good at spelling," she ventured. "But I could always get dates—in history, you know. And I was always over ninety in algebra and deportment."

"It is a special gift, I think," replied Miss Wilson.

"There are a good many highly educated people who can't spell."

"Oh, is that so !" replied the girl, appearing greatly relieved. Then, as if fearing that she had spoken too loud, she bit her lip and glanced timidly about at the near-by tables.

For a little time after that Miss. Wilson watched her as she went on with her letter. Ordinarily girls bored Miss Wilson. There were seventeen hundred of them in the store, and they were always getting either themselves or you into trouble. Indeed one of her chief annoyances was that Mr. Martin, whose task it was to employ the help, was too easy with them. And Joe Hemstead backed him up in it. Take the case of Annie Haggerty, for instance. A sensible woman could see in a moment that Annie was simply bad. . . . But any idle speculation was a relief as Miss Wilson felt this afternoon. And this girl across the table was curiously difficult to place.

She was very young—hardly more than nineteen or twenty—and slim, with a rather small head nicely poised on a long neck; a firm, almost muscular neck, when you looked closely. She had a wide friendly mouth, that showed a tendency to droop at the corners, an unobtrusive chin, and large green-brown eyes. "Cow eyes," thought Miss Wilson, "but they're honest enough. What on earth is she doing in Paris ! Looks like Brooklyn. Or Bridgeport."

Finding no answer to her question, she let her eyes rove over the girl's costume. This was every whit as puzzling as the face. The hat was small, with a single high feather set at not quite the right angle. "Trimmed it herself," thought Miss Wilson, "after a look around on the boulevards." The very plain black suit had probably been picked up in London. The "waist" was American. "Two-nineteen on Fourteenth Street," Miss Wilson decided.

There was not a single indication that anybody had ever spent a cent on the girl. But if that was the case, how did she ever get to Paris at all? She couldn't conceivably be a tourist. And she didn't have the married look. Though you can't always tell. Still—yes, that was the only conceivable explanation.

"What a city Paris is !" she mused, at last in a measure drawn out of her moody introspection. "Every sort of person drifts in here. Anything can happen here. Anything does happen, all the time."

She fell to resenting the fact that she had never really seen Paris—only a few of the hotels, certain of the restaurants on the Right Bank, the Folie Bergeres once with a crowd from Armandeville's, and always the Opera Comique in winter and Longchamp in summer for the fashions, the familiar dressmaking establishments, that was about all. She had never been in the famous old Quartier Latin. Ed Johnson, the glove buyer, had talked enthusiastically, one lonely evening at Vienna, of Lavenue's and its violinist, of the merry irresponsible life at the Café d'Harcourt. She knew well enough that the men buyers looked around a bit. They didn't let their work cut into their evenings—not to any uncomfortable extent. But then, they were men. They took the world as it came, the world that was at every point adapted to their needs, their qualities, their desires. They did not have that exceedingly delicate structure, reputation, to look after—not so that you'd notice it. They were judged, not by their slips, but by their abilities and achievements.

"No," she reflected, "men aren't in a net all their life with an enemy at every opening if they try to escape." At this point her thoughts became vaguer, more in the nature of inarticulate feelings. She was conscious of intense solitude; of the woman's need, if she has chosen work, to work harder and harder and harder, to drive herself mercilessly, to build up an artificial life of routine and habit that shall finally overlay the silent deep stirrings and yearnings that come. . . .

Then, with the thought, "I'm getting absolutely morbid I" she made an effort to bring her thoughts back to the bright busy surface of life, where a woman must dwell if she is to dwell alone.

The girl looked up, and met her eyes.

"Have you been here long ?" asked Miss Wilson.

"Two months in Paris. Fourteen months altogether on this side. I'll be glad to get back." The corners of the girl's mouth drooped as the easy smile died out. "That is a long while to be away."

The man with the Gothic eyelid appeared in the doorway. He was coming toward the table until he observed that the girl and the woman were talking. He stopped short, then, took off his overcoat, and walked back to the newspaper table at the farther end of the room. Miss Wilson watched him. He was fairly tall—five feet ten or eleven, she thought—with noticeably good shoulders. And he moved with almost feminine grace.

She decided to take a chance.

"Your husband just came back," she observed casually.

"My what !" exclaimed the girl blankly. Then, after a glance over her shoulder, she added—"He isn't my husband. I'm not married. That's Blink Moran."

"Blink Moran !" repeated Miss Wilson, unable to suppress a smile.

"Don't you know who he is ?"

Miss Wilson didn't know.

"Why, the middleweight boxer. He's American, too." "Not Irish ?" Miss Wilson was still smiling.

"Oh, that's only the name he took when he started fighting. He's really a Dutchman, from Holland, Michigan. Used to keep bees. His family name's awful funny—Klopf shorn, or Stoomboot, or something. It wouldn't do, you know, on the stage or in the ring."

"No," agreed Miss Wilson, conscious of a quickened if rather startled interest in the man, "I suppose it wouldn't."

"He's a nice fellow," the girl chattered on. "Takes wonderful care of himself—doesn't drink or smoke. And he doesn't like women very well. You see, he has lived here three or four years. When he first came over he fell in love with a French girl and she got all his money away from him that he'd saved—nearly eighteen thousand francs. Then she ran off to South America with a fellow—Buenos Aires. I'd like to go there." She sighed. "He told Will Harper the whole story. Will Harper's my partner. He fights all over Europe now—in Germany and Spain and Austria and Egypt and—and Tunis and Algiers. Makes a good deal of money, I think. He was to have a match with Carpentier, but Carpentier's afraid of him."

This was certainly a bit out of the common. Miss Wilson felt the touch of momentary exhilaration that busy persons of routine habit are likely to feel when an occasional glimpse is vouchsafed them of that irresponsible region known as "Bohemia." She carried the conversation on for a little time, but without success in arriving at an explanation of the girl.

"She looks like something or other"—so ran Miss Wilson's thoughts--"as if she could do some one thing well. She's straight, or at least honest—couldn't tell much of a lie. She doesn't want anything from me, just feels friendly. But she is certainly in with a queer crowd. Prize-fighters! . . . Maybe I'll have something to tell Ed Johnson yet."

While she was studying the girl, the cow eyes came up again.

"You spoke of your partner," said Miss Wilson. "Are you a business woman ?"

The girl shook her head.

"I'm one myself," Miss Wilson continued, by way of reassuring her. "I have a department in a New York store."

The girl did not seem much impressed with this, though she smiled pleasantly. "No," she said, "I don't know anything about business. Be better off if I did. I'm a dancer."

"Oh, a dancer !"

"Yes—one of the four Texas Twisters. We're in the review at the Parnasse Music Hall, my partner and I. Probably you've seen us in New York—Harper and Rainey, we are. I'm Adele Rainey."

Miss Wilson shook her head.

The girl was frankly surprised, and a thought disappointed.

"You've heard of us, though?"

Again Miss Wilson, though swiftly ransacking her memory, had to give a negative response.

"That so ? I just thought probably you had. It takes a long time to get your personality across. Will's all the time saying that." She sighed. But in a moment she was chattering on. "You know they're wild over American dances in Paris. And rag songs. At the Parnasse they have to have twenty English chorus girls because so many of our American songs can't be translated. Like Hitchy Koo, I mean, and Some Boy, and Spooky Ookums. Then we go on every afternoon at the tango tea. Funny—they call it `the."

"Tay?" repeated Miss Wilson, amused.

"No, not that. `Teh', more like. It's pretty near time for me to be getting around there." She consulted the nickel watch that was bound to her wrist with a black strap. "In half an hour. Wouldn't you like to come ? It's nice there in the afternoon."

Miss Wilson found herself somewhat taken aback. Things were moving rapidly. The girl seemed to have no reserve at all—nothing of that instinctive caution, that instant readiness to mask one's feelings and pit one's wits against a hostile mind that is dominant in all competitive business. After all, it was distinctly refreshing. Though how on earth so ingenuous a child, knocking about in the crazy underworld of stageland, could last a year without being utterly smashed was a question. Come to think of it, they did get smashed, all the time. Though it occurred to her that a dancer, if she really knew the job, would stand a much better chance than a mere untrained chorus girl. It was the people without training that went to pieces, people without a real grip on something. It was that way at the store.

"I don't know whether I can," she replied. "I have letters to write, and after that I ought to go back to the hotel and lie down. But thank you for asking me."

The girl's face sobered. "I can't really take you in," she explained painstakingly. "Not in the stage door. They wouldn't let you through. You'd have to buy a ticket and come in the front. But it's only two francs—and two more for the tea, of course. And you could come back and sit with us in the artists' corner."

"Well," replied Miss Wilson, "maybe I will." She looked down at the letters; then, with compressed lips, picked up the one she had laid aside and turned it slowly over and over in her hands.

It was a rule of her life never to slight the work of the day. She prided herself on a sort of healthy contempt for mental philandering. Yet she felt distinctly tempted to let everything slide and go to this absurd "the tango" with her rather interesting new acquaintance. The letter in her hands that she found such difficulty in opening symbolized the pressure that was driving her to let go in just that way.

"I think I'll do it," she thought. "Just relax for once, before I get too old and set to relax at all. It's exactly what Joe Hemstead has been talking, and Ed, and Martin. They'll be thinking next that I've lost my resiliency, and that's just one more way of saying I can't handle my job. They do these things all the time. They go to ball games all summer, while I'm sticking close at the store. Every fall they put on their old clothes and go hunting off in the woods and talk rough and let their beards grow. And it doesn't hurt their work. Not a bit. They keep efficient, and they keep human. Why, even when Ed gets drunk the men all look after him and ease things off for him. There's something men have among themselves—and I don't believe I shall ever know what it is."

Then, with a deliberate exercise of will power, she centered her attention on the unopened letter in her hands.

It was a long letter, written in impassioned language that seemed altogether unreal to Miss Wilson as she read hastily through it. It was signed, "Stanley A."

"Tell me this," ran the conclusion. "If you did not care for me, why did you permit me to become so fond of you? As it is now, the thing is beyond my strength. I'm half crazy with it. It wakes me at night. It depresses me, and rouses moods that I can't control. It certainly isn't my fault. Perhaps it isn't yours, either. But this is a real love. You take it lightly. You ignore me. You refuse to answer my letters. You try to make me out a mere boy. You are hard, hard, hard. You have let business deaden your feelings. For you must have had a heart once, or I . couldn't have felt the quality in you that made me love you."

And so on and on. Miss Wilson was flushing; but behind this emotional mask her mind was cold. What an amazing mixture of ardor and reproach ! What on earth could she say or do ! She had never dreamed of this storm until the moment it broke, a few months back. She knew his age—he was five years younger than she. And she liked him. But his outbursts left her speechless.

"I can't go on like this." Thus the concluding sentences. "I have told Mr. Martin I shall leave before you return. I can't go on. Whatever becomes of me, remember I love you and you alone—Oh, these poor old phrases ! They've been said and written a million million times in this ugly, bitter old world ! A million million times have men poured out these phrases to women who have laughed or kept silent. I shall leave this part of the world. It won't do for me to be near you—I should simply break out again. And you, with your coldness, would hurt me more than I could bear. Only once more I shall see you. I don't know where or when, but I shall see you once. After that it will be good-by. I don't know what will become of me then. But I must give you one more chance to show at least a human feeling toward me."

She went back and read the letter all through again, slowly. It irritated her. For it stirred memories of the one real love story in her life—memories she had been trying, during nearly eight years, to supplant with hard work and new interests.

Stanley's outbreaks had roused her before, on a number of occasions. That was what irritated her—his power to stir her feelings. That was what irritated her in the approaches of old M. Armandeville and the many others. For they made her think about love. And for years she had told herself that she did not wish to think about love.

Certainly this new letter of Stanley's had stirred her deeply. Confused feelings were rushing up from the remote corners of memory, recollections of the one great emotional storm that had swept over her and that had left behind it yearnings and a strain of bitterness. The man, in her case, had been her first employer, Harris Doreyn, of Chicago. He was married. Their attachment had grown, little by little, through several years of a close working companionship. It had very nearly swept both off their feet. Then, to save herself, she had left him; and he had been man enough to let her go.

She had for a time succeeded, especially during the years of her first success at New York, in driving these poignant, bewildering memories out of mind. But lately, since the enthusiasm of her middle twenties had passed and her nerves had begun to show the effects of those driving years, they had with increasing frequency slipped back among her conscious thoughts. More than a year earlier she had become aware, through a bantering remark of Ed Johnson's, that she had fallen into the habit of quoting bits of the philosophy of Harris Doreyn. Since then she had on more than one occasion caught herself at this, and had made up her mind to be more careful about it. Even after the years, it was best that she should not appear to have much to say about that man.

Her irritation deepened. She did not like to hurt this bewildered boy; but above all she resented being hurt herself.

She seized a pen, and with a hand that trembled wrote right across the first page of his letter

"You have no right to say these things. Please do not do so again, as I can not discuss them with you. You are making it impossible for me to treat you with even ordinary courtesy. If you are not a poor coward you will stay at your desk and make good. And please try to understand once and for all that I do not care for you in this way and never shall. This is final. I do not wish to be forced to say it again."

The girl across the table looked up now, Etna spoke. "Do you think you'd like to come ?"

Miss Wilson knit her brows; and said, "Let me think a moment."

She reread what she had just written.

Then she deliberately tore it into small bits, and the rest of his letter with it, and dropped it all into the waste basket. There was downright perplexity on her face. Writing a letter in a fit of anger—she certainly knew better than that. And calling him a "poor coward"—he would have a case against her, and in the intensity of his confusion would press it. She simply couldn't write him at all, and she wouldn't try.

Adele Rainey turned and beckoned to her friend the middleweight. He promptly put down his newspaper and came walking swiftly and lightly toward them, the whole length of the big room. It occurred to Miss Wilson, as she covertly watched him, that he had the grace of a tiger, and the strength.

Adele looked up at him with some anxiety on her ingenuous face. "I suppose everything was all right ?" she said. "Or else you would have come and told me."

Miss Wilson listened for his reply. She was prepared for rough and ungrammatical speech. Probably he would say "youse" and "t'inks," and that curiously indiscriminate substitute for the second personal pronoun, "Bo." Little Jimmy Hartigan, who did her errands at the store, was consumed with admiration for just such rough characters as this Blink person; and she had labored much, at times, to elevate his standard of English speech.

But the Blink person replied, very simply and directly-

"Yes—all right. It cried some, and I held it while Blondie went to the English drug store for some paregoric. Then it went to sleep again."

"Oh," exclaimed the girl, "was Blondie there ? Where was Millicent ?"

"Monocle John came for her with a taxi to substitute for Juliette at the Parnasse."

The girl looked very thoughtful. "I'd rather he'd taken Blondie," she mused. "Millicent's got more sense. I've been writing to Juliette. Have they heard anything from her ?"

"Not that I know of." He consulted his watch. "It's about time to be starting."

"Yes, I know," she replied, sealing her letter and reaching for the imitation ermine stole. Then she hesitated and sent an inquiring glance across the table.

Miss Wilson came at that instant to a decision.

"Be with you in a minute," she said.

She tore up the letter to Joe Hemstead and sent the small, fluttering pieces to nestle among the remains of the Aitcheson letter in the waste basket. Her gray-blue eyes flashed as she took a cable blank from the rack, and wrote-

"Hemstead Hartmanshop New York. Taking vacation now sending Isbell back letter follows. Wilson."

"I can send it from the branch post-office in the Rue Gluck-Meyerbeer," she thought, "on our way. And I'll wire May to-night when I've had time to think it over."

Blink Moran stood opposite her now. Evidently introductions were not essential in this circle; for Adele Rainey merely said, "The lady's coming with us, Blink." And Blink inclined his head, gravely.

At the curb he called a taxi. He stepped out at the post-office to send the cablegram for Miss Wilson; and at her request told her exactly how much it came to. He was straightforward, but very reserved. Which fact rather amused Miss Wilson. A grave reticence, not without its element of quiet courtesy, was hardly the quality she would have looked for in a prize-fighter.

Well, here she was—crowded into a taxi with this well-dressed pugilist and a badly dressed dancing girl with attractively honest eyes. She felt reasonably certain that the confusion of purpose within her and the distinct touch of exhilaration were not apparent. Her face and manner were too well schooled for that.