and if you'll go you'll sail next Wednesday."

After his talk with the foreign editor Sam again walked home on air.
He could not believe it was real--that it was actually to him it had
happened; for hereafter he was to witness the march of great events,
to come in contact with men of international interests. Instead of
reporting what was of concern only from the Battery to Forty-seventh
Street, he would now tell New York what was of interest in Europe and
the British Empire, and so to the whole world. There was one drawback
only to his happiness--there was no one with whom he might divide it.
He wanted to celebrate his good fortune; he wanted to share it with
some one who would understand how much it meant to him, who would really
care. Had Sister Anne lived, she would have understood; and he would
have laid himself and his new position at her feet and begged her to
accept them--begged her to run away with him to this tremendous and
terrifying capital of the world, and start the new life together.

Among all the women he knew, there was none to take her place. Certainly
Anita Flagg could not take her place. Not because she was rich, not
because she had jeered at him and made him a laughing-stock, not because
his admiration--and he blushed when he remembered how openly, how
ingenuously he had shown it to her--meant nothing; but because the girl
he thought she was, the girl he had made dreams about and wanted to
marry without a moment's notice, would have seen that what he offered,
ridiculous as it was when offered to Anita Flagg, was not ridiculous
when offered sincerely to a tired, nerve-worn, overworked nurse in a
hospital. It was because Anita Flagg had not seen that that she could
not now make up to him for the girl he had lost, even though she herself
had inspired that girl and for a day given her existence.

Had he known it, the Anita Flagg of his imagining was just as unlike and
as unfair to the real girl as it was possible for two people to be.
His Anita Flagg he had created out of the things he had read of her in
impertinent Sunday supplements and from the impression he had been given
of her by the little ass, Holworthy. She was not at all like that.
Ever since she had come of age she had been beset by sycophants and
flatterers, both old and young, both men and girls, and by men who
wanted her money and by men who wanted her. And it was because she got
the motives of the latter two confused that she was so of