confined. He had
the run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally with
clothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the other
servants treated him as the member of the family which they had been
informed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness,
asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on the
footing of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treated
Larry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and in
every detail made good on her promise to give him a chance. In fact, in
all his life Larry had never lived so well.

As for Miss Sherwood's aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood's mother and a
figure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her own
sitting-room. She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists,
and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which they
kept repopulating her reading-table. Larry she accepted with a hazy,
preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantial
characters of her latest fiction.

Of course Miss Sherwood did not make of Larry a complete confidant. For
all her smiling, easy frankness, he knew that there were many doors
of her being which she never unlocked for him. What he saw was so
interesting that he could not help being interested about the rest. Of
course many details were open to him. She was an excellent sportswoman;
a rare dancer; there were many men interested in her; she dined out
almost every other evening at some social affair blooming belatedly in
May (most of her friends were already settled in their country homes,
and she was still in town only because her place on Long Island was in
disorder due to a two months' delay in the completion of alterations
caused by labor difficulties); she had made a study of beetles; she had
a tiny vivarium in the apartment and here she would sit studying her
pets with an interest and patience not unlike that of old Fabre upon his
stony farm. Also, as Larry learned from her accounts, there was a day
nursery on the East Side whose lack of a deficit was due to her.

All in all she was a healthy, normal, intelligent, unself-sacrificing
woman who belonged distinctly to her own day; who gave a great deal to
life, and who took a great deal from life.

Often Larry wished she would speak of Hunt. He was curious about Hunt,
of whom he thought daily; and such talk might yield him information
about t