rotected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....

So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to
strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her
like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would
finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to
them----But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a
policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.

Already they were rising, going out.

He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up
with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He
followed them out, still conning head-lines in his paper. His grave
absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a
respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange
young women.

His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they
were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar
street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a
street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the
Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under
the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it
the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom
he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the
perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman
nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's
pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the
house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently
took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that
dear old friend.

Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly
uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked
over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street.
He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he
hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of
a plot.

The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with
shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark
doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows.
Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in
this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair
furniture and banker