ey had tea at the Manhattan.
Carl dined with Ruth and her father; once he took her brother, Mason,
to lunch at the Aero Club.

Ruth was ill in March; not with a mysterious and romantic malady, but
with grippe, which, she wrote Carl, made her hate the human race, New
York, charity, and Shakespeare. She could not decide whether to go to
Europe, or to die in a swoon and be buried under a mossy headstone.

He answered that he would go abroad for her; and every day she
received tokens bearing New York post-marks, yet obviously coming from
foreign parts: a souvenir card from the Piraeus, stating that Carl was
"visiting cousin T. Demetrieff Philopopudopulos, and we are enjoying
our drives so much. Dem. sends his love; wish you could be with us";
an absurd string of beads from Port Said and a box of Syrian sweets; a
Hindu puzzle guaranteed to amuse victims of the grippe, and
gold-fabric slippers of China; with long letters nonchalantly relating
encounters with outlaws and wrecks and new varieties of disease.

He called on her before her nose had quite lost the grippe or her
temper the badness.

Phil Dunleavy was there, lofty and cultured in evening clothes,
apparently not eager to go. He stayed till ten minutes to ten, and, by
his manner of cold surprise when Carl tried to influence the
conversation, was able to keep it to the Kreisler violin recitals, the
architecture of St. John the Divine's, and Whitney's polo, while Carl
tried not to look sulky, and manoeuvered to get out the excellent
things he was prepared to say on other topics; not unlike the small
boy who wants to interrupt whist-players and tell them about his new
skates. When Phil was gone Ruth sighed and said, belligerently:

"Poor Phil, he has to work so hard, and all the people at his office,
even the firm, are just as common as they can be; common as the
children at my beastly old settlement-house."

"What do you mean by 'common'?" bristled Carl.

"Not of our class."

"What do you mean by 'our class'?"

And the battle was set.

Ruth refused to withdraw "common." Carl recalled Abraham Lincoln and
Golden-Rule Jones and Walt Whitman on the subject of the Common
People, though as to what these sages had said he was vague. Ruth
burst out:

"Oh, you can talk all you like about theories, but just the same, in
real life most people are common as dirt. And just about as admissible
to Society. It's all very fine to be good to servants, but you would
be the f