cult to say to her from that distance the sort
of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it,
and I did my best.

"I shall miss my lunches here very much when I'm gone."

"Did you say coffee to-day?"

"Chocolate. I shall miss--"

"And the lettuce sandwiches?"

"Yes. You don't realize how much these lunches--"

"Have cost you?" She seemed determined to keep laughing.

"You have said it. They have cost me my--"

"I can give you the receipt, you know."

"The receipt?"

"For Lady Baltimore, to take with you."

"You'll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart."

"Oh, his heart! General, listen to--" From habit she had turned to
where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was
mastered. "Never mind!" she quickly resumed. "Please don't speak about
it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come
in yesterday morning after--after the bridge."

"I hope I have a heart," I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on
in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.

But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman's Exchange.

It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow
possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement
of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn't bend her head
down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn't new to me, this form
of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it
denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she
did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza
La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.

"Good morning," said Hortense.

It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of
melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn't
become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all
expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty,
her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it,
not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shining
from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber
hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some
radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have
turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn't so
much of nature that she, in her h