my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She
may be dead now.

"It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance
of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more
comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came
along she--well, as she didn't, she must have been a good girl, don't
you suppose?"

The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an
endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and stacks of corn, with
pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal
sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise.

"What do you call a good girl?" she asked.

"That's a hard question to answer nowadays."

"Why nowadays?"

"Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful and our ideas
of girls are so much more--complicated. Anyway, as the fellow said,
that's my story. And now you know all about Mamise that I know. Can
you forgive her for wearing your name?"

"I could forgive that Mamise anything," she sighed. "But this Mamise I
can't forgive at all."

This puzzled him. "I don't quite get that."

She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong of what
helpless writers call "a shady dell"; its tenderness won from him a
timid confession.

"You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are as different as
can be, and yet somehow you remind me of each other."

"Somehow we are each other."

He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him a hasty glance
from the road. She was blushing.

He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, "It's a small world,
after all." He nearly swung to the other extreme. "Well, I'll be--" He
settled like a dying pendulum on, "Well--well!" They both laughed, and
he put out his hand. "Pleased to meet you again."

She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant.

The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a long, steep
cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted. The whir of the engine
stopped. The car sailed softly.

He was eager for news of the years between then and now. It was so
wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have
evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the
working of such social machinery. He urged:

"Tell me all about yourself."

"No, thanks."

"But what happened to you after I saw you? You don't remember me, of
course."

"I remember the monkey."

They both laughed at the u