Even more brightly Gertie announced: "I'm afraid you're not in a very good humor this afternoon. I'm sorry that my plans don't interest you.

Of course, I should be very temperamental if I expected you to apologize for cursing and swearing, so I think I'll just leave you here, and when you feel better----" She was infuriatingly cheerful.

"----I should be pleased to have you call me up. Good-by, Carl, and I hope that your walk will do you good."

She turned into a footpath; left him muttering in tones of youthful injury, "Jiminy! I've done it now!"

He was in Joralemon.

A victoria drove by with a dowager who did not seem to be humbly courting the best set in Joralemon. A grin lightened Carl's face. He chuckled: "By golly! Gertie handled it splendidly! I'm to call up and be humble, and then--bing!--the least I can do is to propose and be led to the altar and teach a Sunday-school cla.s.s at St. Orgul's for the rest of my life! Come hither, Hawk Ericson, let us hold council.

Here's the way Gertie will dope it out, I guess. ('Eltruda!') I'll dine in solitary regret for saying 'h.e.l.l'----No. First I'm to walk down-town, alone and busy repenting, and then I'll feed alone, and by eight o'clock I'll be so tired of myself that I'll call up and beg pretty. Rats! It's rotten mean to dope it out like that, but just the same----Me that have done what I've done--worried to death over one accidental 'h.e.l.l'!... Hey there, you taxi!"

Grandly he rode through the Park, and in an unrepentant manner bowed to every pretty woman he saw, to the disapproval of their silk-hatted escorts.

He forgot the existence of Gertie Cowles and the Old Home Folks.

But he really could not afford a taxicab, and he had to make up for it by economy. At seven-thirty he gloomily entered Miggleton's Restaurant, on Forty-second Street, the least unbearable of the "Popular Prices--Tables for Ladies" dens, and slumped down at a table near the window. There were few diners. Carl was as much a stranger as on the morning when he had first invaded New York, to find work with an automobile company, and had pa.s.sed this same restaurant; still was he a segregated stranger, despite the fact that, two blocks away, in the Aero Club, two famous aviators were agreeing that there had never been a more consistently excellent flight in America than Hawk Ericson's race from Chicago to New York.

Carl considered the delights of the Cowles flat, Ray's stories about Plato and business, and the sentimental things Gertie played on the guitar. He suddenly determined to go off some place and fly an aeroplane; as suddenly knew that he was not yet ready to return to the game. He read the _Evening Telegram_ and cheerlessly peered out of the window at the gray snow-veil which shrouded Forty-second Street.

As he finished his dessert and stirred his coffee he stared into a street-car stalled in a line of traffic outside. Within the car, seen through the snow-mist, was a girl of twenty-two or three, with satiny slim features and ash-blond hair. She was radiant in white-fox furs.

Carl craned to watch. He thought of the girl who, asking a direction before the Florida Lunch Room in Chicago, had inspired him to become a chauffeur.

The girl in the street-car was listening to her companion, who was a dark-haired girl with humor and excitement about life in her face, well set-up, not tall, in a smartly tailored coat of brown pony-skin and a small hat that was all lines and no tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. Both of them seemed amused, possibly by the lofty melancholy of a traffic policeman beside the car, who raised his hand as though he had high ideals and a slight stomach-ache. The dark-haired girl tapped her round knees with the joy of being alive.

The street-car started. Carl was already losing in the city jungle the two acquaintances whom he had just made. The car stopped again, still blocked. Carl seized his coat, dropped a fifty-cent piece on the cashier's desk, did not wait for his ten cents change, ran across the street (barely escaping a taxicab), galloped around the end of the car, swung up on the platform.

As he took a seat opposite the two girls he asked himself just what he expected to do now. The girls were unaware of his existence. And why had he hurried? The car had not started again. But he studied his unconscious conquests from behind his newspaper, vastly content.

In the unnatural quiet of the stalled car the girls were irreverently discussing "George." He heard enough to know that they were of the rather smart, rather cultured cla.s.s known as "New-Yorkers"--they might be Russian-American princesses or social workers or ill-paid governesses or actresses or merely persons with one motor-car and a useful papa in the family.

But in any case they were not of the kind he could pick up.

The tall girl of the ash-blond hair seemed to be named Olive, being quite unolive in tint, while her livelier companion was apparently christened Ruth. Carl wearied of Olive's changeless beauty as quickly as he did of her silver-handled umbrella. She merely knew how to listen. But the less spectacular, less beautiful, less languorous, dark-haired Ruth was born a good comrade. Her laughter marked her as one of the women whom earth-quake and flood and child-bearing cannot rob of a sense of humor; she would have the inside view, the sophisticated understanding of everything.

The car was at last free of the traffic. It turned a corner and started northward. Carl studied the girls.

Ruth was twenty-four, perhaps, or twenty-five. Not tall, slight enough to nestle, but strong and self-reliant. She had quant.i.ties of dark-brown hair, crisp and glinty, though not sleek, with eyebrows noticeably dark and heavy. Her smile was made irresistible by her splendidly shining teeth, fairly large but close-set and white; and not only the corners of her eyes joined in her smile, but even her nose, her delicate yet piquant nose, which could quiver like a deer's. When she laughed, Carl noted, Ruth had a trick of lifting her heavy lids quickly, and surprising one with a glint of blue eyes where brown were expected. Her smooth, healthy, cream-colored skin was rosy with winter, and looked as though in summer it would tan evenly, without freckles. Her chin was soft, but without a dimple, and her jaws had a clean, boyish leanness. Her smooth neck and delicious shoulders were curved, not fatly, but with youth and happiness. They were square, capable shoulders, with no mid-Victorian droop about them. Her waist was slender naturally, not from stays. Her short but not fat fingers were the ideal instruments for the piano. Slim were her crossed feet, and her unwrinkled pumps (foolish footgear for a snowy evening) seemed eager to dance.

There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth had, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows, of tennis and a boat with bright, canted sails, not of boudoir nor garden dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be "protected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....

So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to them----But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.

Already they were rising, going out.

He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He followed them out, still conning head-lines in his paper. His grave absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange young women.

His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that dear old friend.

Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street.

He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of a plot.

The block through which the cavalcade was pa.s.sing was lined with shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows.

Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair furniture and bankers had mattered, had seemed imposing. But the girls ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except that five motor-cars stood before it. Carl, pa.s.sing, went up the steps of the next house and rang the bell.

"What a funny place!" he heard one of the girls--he judged that it was Ruth--remark from the neighboring stoop. "It looks exactly like Aunt Emma when she wears an Alexandra bang. Do we go right up? Oughtn't we to ring? It ought to be the craziest party--anarchists----"

"A party, eh?" thought Carl.

"----ought to ring, I suppose, but----Yes, there's sure to be all sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallet's----" said the voice of the other girl, then the door closed upon both of them.

And an abashed Carl realized that a maid had opened the door of the house at which he himself had rung, and was glaring at him as he craned over to view the next-door stoop.

"W-where----Does Dr. Brown live here?" he stuttered.

"No, 'e don't," the maid snapped, closing the door.

Carl groaned: "He don't? Dear old Brown? Not live here? Huh? What shall I do?"

In remarkably good spirits he moved over in front of the house into which Ruth and Olive had gone. People were coming to the party in twos and threes. Yes. The men were in evening clothes. He had his information.

Swinging his stick up to a level with his shoulder at each stride, he raced to Fifty-ninth Street and the nearest taxi-stand. He was whirled to his room. He literally threw his clothes off. He shaved hastily, singing, "Will You Come to the Ball," from "The Quaker Girl," and slipped into evening clothes and his suavest dress-shirt. Seizing things all at once--top-hat, m.u.f.fler, gloves, pocketbook, handkerchief, cigarette-case, keys--and hanging them about him as he fled down the decorous stairs, he skipped to the taxicab and started again for Fifty-blankth Street.

At the house of the party he stopped to find on the letter-box in the entry the name "Mrs. Hallet," mentioned by Olive. There was no such name. He tried the inner door. It opened. He cheerily began to mount steep stairs, which kept on for miles, climbing among slate-colored walls, past empty wall-niches with toeless plaster statues. The hallways, dim and high and sn.o.bbish, and the dark old double doors, scowled at him. He boldly returned the scowl. He could hear the increasing din of a talk-party coming from above. When he reached the top floor he found a door open on a big room crowded with shrilly chattering people in florid clothes. There was a hint of bra.s.sware and paintings and silken Turkish rugs.

But no sight of Ruth or Olive.

A maid was bobbing to him and breathing, "That way, please, at the end of the hall." He went meekly. He did not dare to search the clamorous crowd for the girls, as yet.

He obediently added his hat and coat and stick to an uncomfortable-looking pile of wraps writhing on a bed in a small room that had a Copley print of Sargent's "Prophets," a calendar, and an unimportant white rocker.

It was time to go out and face the party, but he had stage-fright.

While climbing the stairs he had believed that he was in touch with the two girls, but now he was separated from them by a crowd, farther from them than when he had followed them down the unfriendly street.

And not till now did he quite grasp the fact that the hostess might not welcome him. His glowing game was becoming very dull-toned. He lighted a cigarette and listened to the beating surf of the talk in the other room.

Another man came in. Like all the rest, he gave up the brilliant idea of trying to find an unpreempted place for his precious newly ironed silk hat, and resignedly dumped it on the bed. He was a pa.s.sable man, with a gentlemanly mustache and good pumps. Carl knew that fact because he was comparing his own clothes and deciding that he had none the worst of it. But he was relieved when the waxed mustache moved a couple of times, and its owner said, in a friendly way: "Beastly jam!... May I trouble you for a match?"

Carl followed him out to the hostess, a small, busy woman who made a business of being vivacious and letting the light catch the fringes of her gold hair as she nodded. Carl nonchalantly shook hands with her, bubbling: "So afraid couldn't get here. My play----But at last----"

He was in a panic. But the hostess, instead of calling for the police, gushed, "_So_ glad you _could_ come!" combining a kittenish mechanical smile for him with a glance over his shoulder at the temporary butler.

"I want you to meet Miss Moeller, Mr.--uh--Mr----"

"I knew you'd forget it!" Carl was brotherly and protecting in his manner. "Ericson, Oscar Ericson."

"Oh, of course. How stupid of me! Miss Moeller, want you to meet Mr.

Oscar Ericson--you know----"

"S' happy meet you, Miss Mmmmmmm," said Carl, tremendously well-bred in manner. "Can we possibly go over and be clever in a corner, do you think?"

He had heard Colonel Haviland say that, but his manner gave it no quotation-marks.