as been broken. Her "stunt" was greeted with, "Oh, how
cun-ning! Please do it again!"

She prepared to do it again. Carl made hasty motions of departure,
pathetically holding his throat.

He did not begin to get restless till he had reached Ninety-sixth
Street and had given up his seat in the subway to a woman who
resembled Tottykins. He wondered if he had not been at the Old Home
long enough. At Seventy-second Street, on an inspiration that came as
the train was entering the station, he changed to a local and went
down to Fifty-ninth Street. He found an all-night garage, hired a
racing-car, and at dawn he was driving furiously through Long Island,
a hundred miles from New York, on a roadway perilously slippery with
falling snow.

CHAPTER XXVII

Carl wished that Adelaide Benner had never come from Joralemon to
study domestic science. He felt that he was a sullen brute, but he
could not master his helpless irritation as he walked with Adelaide
and Gertie Cowles through Central Park, on a snowy Sunday afternoon of
December. Adelaide assumed that one remained in the state of mind
called Joralemon all one's life; that, however famous he might be, the
son of Oscar Ericson was not sufficiently refined for Miss Cowles of
the Big House on the Hill, though he might improve under Cowles
influences. He was still a person who had run away from Plato! But
that assumption was far less irritating than one into which Adelaide
threw all of her faded yearning--that Gertie and he were in love.

Adelaide kept repeating, with coy slyness: "Isn't it too bad you two
have me in the way!" and: "Don't mind poor me. Auntie will turn her
back any time you want her to."

And Gertie merely blushed, murmuring, "Don't be a silly."

At Eightieth Street Adelaide announced: "Now I must leave you
children. I'm going over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I do love
to see art pictures. I've always wanted to. Now be as good as you can,
you two."

Gertie was mechanical about replying. "Oh, don't run away, Addy dear."

"Oh yes, you two will miss an old maid like me terribly!" And Adelaide
was off, a small, sturdy, undistinguished figure, with an unyielding
loyalty to Gertie and to the idea of marriage.

Carl looked at her bobbing back (with wrinkles in her cloth jacket
over the shoulders) as she melted into the crowd of glossy fur-trimmed
New-Yorkers. He comprehended her goodness, her devotion. He sighed,
"If she'd only stop this hinting