coming Sunday.

CHAPTER XXIX

Like a country small boy waiting for the coming of his city cousin,
who will surely have new ways of playing Indians, Carl prepared to see
Ruth Winslow and her background. What was she? Who? Where? He pictured
her as dwelling in everything from a millionaire's imitation chateau,
with footmen and automatic elevators, to a bachelor girl's flat in an
old-fashioned red-brick Harlem tenement. But more than that: What
would she herself be like against that background?

Monday he could think of nothing but the joy of having discovered a
playmate. The secret popped out from behind everything he did. Tuesday
he was worried by finding himself unable to remember whether Ruth's
hair was black or dark brown. Yet he could visualize Olive's
ash-blond. Why? Wednesday afternoon, when he was sleepy in the office
after eating too much beefsteak and kidney pie, drinking too much
coffee, and smoking too many cigarettes, at lunch with Mr. VanZile,
when he was tortured by the desire to lay his head on his arms and
yield to drowsiness, he was suddenly invaded by a fear that Ruth was
snobbish. It seemed to him that he ought to do something about it
immediately.

The rest of the week he merely waited to see what sort of person the
totally unknown Miss Ruth Winslow might be. His most active occupation
outside the office was feeling guilty over not telephoning to Gertie.

At 3.30 P.M., Sunday, he was already incased in funereal
morning-clothes and warning himself that he must not arrive at Miss
Winslow's before five. His clothes were new, stiff as though they
belonged to a wax dummy. Their lines were straight and without
individuality. He hitched his shoulders about and kept going to the
mirror to inspect the fit of the collar. He repeatedly re brushed his
hair, regarding the unclean state of his military brushes with
disgust. About six times he went to the window to see if it had
started to snow.

At ten minutes to four he sternly jerked on his coat and walked far
north of Ninety-second Street, then back.

He arrived at a quarter to five, but persuaded himself that this was a
smarter hour of arrival than five.

Ruth Winslow's home proved to be a rather ordinary
three-story-and-basement gray stone dwelling, with heavy Russian net
curtains at the broad, clear-glassed windows of the first floor, and
an attempt to escape from the stern drabness of the older type of New
York houses by introducing a box-