ame_ in black velvet, more
dignified, apparently inches taller, and in a vice-regally bad temper.
As they drove off she declared:

"Sorry I'm in such a villainous temper. I hadn't a single pair of
decent white gloves, and I tore some old black Spanish lace on the
gown I was going to wear, and my entire family, whom God
unquestionably sent to be a trial to test me, clustered about my door
while I was dressing and bawled in queries about laundry and other
horribly vulgar things."

Carl did not see much of the play. He was watching Ruth's eyes,
listening to her whispered comments. She declared that she was awed by
the presence of two aviators and a newspaper man. Actually, she was
working, working at bringing out MacMonnies, a shy, broad-shouldered,
inarticulate youth who supposed that he never had to talk.

Carl had planned to go to the Ritz for after-theater supper, but Ruth
and Olive persuaded him to take them to the cafe of the Rector's of
that time; for, they said, they had never been in a Broadway cafe, and
they wanted to see the famous actors with their make-ups off.

At the table Carl carried Ruth off in talk, like a young Lochinvar out
of the Middle West. Around them was the storm of highballs and brandy
and club soda, theatrical talk, and a confused mass of cigar-smoke,
shirt-fronts, white shoulders, and drab waiters; yet here was a quiet
refuge for the eternal force of life....

Carl was asking: "Would you rather be a perfect lady and have blue
bowls with bunnies on them for your very worst dissipation, or be like
your mountain-climbing woman and have anarchists for friends one day
and be off hiking through the clouds the next?"

"Oh, I don't know. I know I'm terribly susceptible to the 'nice things
of life,' but I do get tired of being nice. Especially when I have a
bad temper, as I had to-night. I'm not at all imprisoned in a harem,
and as for social aspirations, I'm a nobody. But still I have been
brought up to look at things that aren't 'like the home life of our
dear Queen' as impossible, and I'm quite sure that father believes
that poor people are poor because they are silly and don't try to be
rich. But I've been reading; and I've made--to you it may seem silly
to call it a discovery, but to me it's the greatest discovery I've
ever made: that people are just people, all of them--that the little
mousey clerk may be a hero, and the hero may be a nobody--that the
motorman that lets his beastly car spa