e of Felicity. Whenever he
observed haltingly, as he did over and over again, that it was no place
for a girl like her (Fiegenspann's) and that she should be gotten out
before it was too late, she learned to agree with him mechanically.
Instead of hating his blindness, as persistently as she dared she swung
the conversation more and more to other things.

From the beginning she found it hard to make him talk about himself.
That instantly set him apart from all other men in her experience. For
they had talked of little else. And yet, when finally she had it from
him, she found his ambition anything but vague.

"I like animals," he told her on one such occasion, "and the--the
country. I guess that's what I am, a country boy. I sure would like
to own a ranch."

He'd not pressed her so eagerly for her hopes. Scarcely. His
singleness of interest at least was wholly masculine. But that didn't
deter her. She found herself giving them to him just the same, just as
eagerly.

"A ranch!" she seized hungrily upon that word. "A home! A white house
on a hill with light green shutters. The house, of course, not the
hill." She went further.

"And a white and blue kitchen." Her haste to tell him was bubbling.
"With aluminum pots and pans. Dozens! A whole set!"

And, somehow subdued:

"They're very expensive."

Broadway never knew anything about that courtship. But Felicity used
to wake up, now and then, and hear the other girl crying softly in the
night.

It was a long bad period for Cecille. At first the birth of this
wholly new thing within her baffled her own power to reason. She
watched its mushroom growth with fascination, just a little aghast.
But when, all in a kind of cataclysmic flash, she thought to recognize
it for what it was, she shrank away as if from a malignant fungus.

From the first evening one thing had intrigued her. Her discovery that
the sensation of pervading cleanliness which she always had from him
was not a result of the careful clothes he wore but something more
essential made her remember how the Sunday-groomed louts of other days,
reeking with cheap toilet water and hair oil, had filled her with dull
loathing. She had never attempted an analysis of that distaste. Now
trying to analyze its opposite, in the case of Perry Blair, she arrived
at a disquieting certainty. She found she could no more be near him,
no more glance at him, without being conscious of him physically, th