. Not only had they dared
be silent, but they had not tried each other out tentatively by talking
about people they knew. Then he had said it was hard for him to
remember this was their first talk together alone. Beth realized that
here was a subject who would not bore her before his portrait was
finished.

"Does David Cairns know Miss Nettleton very well?" Bedient asked, as he
was leaving.

She smiled at the question, and was about to reply that they had been
right good friends for years, when it occurred that he might have a
deeper meaning.

Bedient resumed while she was thinking: "I know that he admires her
work and intelligence, but he never spoke to me of any further
discoveries. Perhaps he wouldn't.... He's a singularly fine chap, finer
than I knew.... I noticed a short essay in your stand that contains a
sentence I cannot forget. It was about a rare man who 'stooped and
picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears.'"

"Browning," she said excitedly.

"Yes.... Good-by and thank you.... To-morrow?"

"Yes."

* * * * *

He left her in the whirl of this new conception. She was taking dinner
with David Cairns that night. David, she felt, had arranged this for
further urging in the matter of her seeing his friend. And now she
smiled at the surprise in store for him; then for a long time, until
the yellows and browns were thickly shadowed about her, Beth sat very
still, thinking about the Vina Nettleton of yesterday, and the altered
and humble David Cairns of the past fortnight.... In the single saying
of Bedient's, that he had found Cairns finer than he knew, there was a
remarkable, winsome quality for her perception. Bedient had started the
revolution which was clearing the inner atmospheres of his friend; and
yet, he refused any part.

David took her for dinner to a club far down-town--a dining-room on the
twentieth floor, overlooking the rivers and the bay, the shipping and
the far shores pointed off with lights.... They waited by a window in
the main hall for a moment while a smaller room was being arranged.
Forty or more business men were banqueting in a glare of light and
glass and red roses--a commercial dinner with speeches. The talk had to
do with earnings, per cents, leakages, markets and such matters. The
lower lid of many an eye was updrawn in calculation.

Beth shivered, for she saw avarice, cunning, bluff, campaigning with
humor and natural