ntleman. She wore a
full white muslin gown with a blue sash, her hair primly parted in the
middle, her right hand laid flat over her left in her lap. Her
vocabulary was choice. For a second, when she referred to winter
sports at Lake Placid, she forgot herself and tucked one smooth,
silk-clad, un-mid-Victorian leg under her, but instantly she recovered
her poise of a vicarage, remarking, "I have been subject to very
careless influences lately." She called him neither "Carl" nor "Mr.
Ericson" nor anything else, and he dared not venture on Ruth.

He went home in bewilderment. As he crossed Broadway he loitered
insolently, as though challenging the flying squadron of taxicabs to
run him down. "What do I care if they hit me?" he inquired, savagely,
of his sympathetic and applauding self. Every word she had said he
examined, finding double and triple meanings, warning himself not to
regard her mood seriously, but unable to make the warning take.

On his next call there was a lively Ruth who invited him up to the
library, read extracts from Stephen Leacock's _Nonsense Novels_;
turned companionably serious, and told him how divided were her
sympathies between her father--the conscientiously worried
employer--and a group of strikers in his factory. She made coffee in a
fantastic percolator, and played Debussy and ragtime. At ten-thirty,
the hour at which he had vehemently resolved to go, they were curled
in two big chairs eating chocolate peppermints and talking of
themselves apropos of astronomy and the Touricar and Lincoln Beachey's
daring and Mason Winslow and patriotism and Joralemon. Ruth's father
drifted in from his club at a quarter to eleven. Carl now met him for
the first time. He was a large-stomached, bald, sober, friendly man,
with a Gladstone collar, a huge watch-chain, kindly trousers and
painfully smart tan boots, a father of the kind who gives cigars and
non-committal encouragement to daughter's suitors.

* * * * *

It takes a voice with personality and modulations to make a
fifteen-minute telephone conversation tolerable, and youth to make it
possible. Ruth had both. For fifteen minutes she discussed with Carl
the question of whether she should go to Marion Browne's dinner-dance
at Delmonico's, as Phil wished, or go skeeing in the Westchester
Hills, as Carl wished, the coming Saturday--the first Saturday in
February, 1913. Carl won.

* * * * *