de the mistake of imagining that one is
always master of casual incidents. To meet a young woman by the most
trivial chance, to extend a brief courtesy to her, these were matters
which hold scarcely the germs of a menacing situation, not menacing to
him, of course--they never could be menacing to him; he was still
thinking of things from the viewpoint of Claire Robson.

To tell the truth, he was annoyed at having been mixed up in Claire's
flight from the Flint household. Had Flint been a complete stranger he
would not have minded so much. He was still divided by the appeal to his
chivalry and the sense of loyalty that a man feels to the masculine
friends of his youth. In her telephone message Claire had put the matter
very casually--the track was washed out and she was wondering whether he
contemplated returning to town that evening. But he guessed at once what
lay back of her matter-of-fact boldness. He had guessed so completely
that he had decided not only to return to town, but to start at once.

He wondered now whether he had answered the appeal because a woman was
in a desperate situation or because that woman was Claire Robson. All
through the dinner hour at the Tom Forsythes he had thought about her,
had speculated vaguely what mischance or effrontery had been responsible
for her ill-timed visit to Flint's. He remembered trying to decide
whether the young woman was extraordinarily deep or extraordinarily
simple and frank. He did not like to concede that he could be influenced
by anything so transparently malicious as Mrs. Richards's statements
regarding the absence of Mrs. Flint, but he was bound to admit that they
did nothing to render the situation less innocent; what had particularly
annoyed him was the fact that he should have given the matter a second
thought. To begin with, it was none of his business and he was not a man
who presumed to judge or even speculate on other people's indiscretions.
Claire Robson was no sheltered schoolgirl. She was a full-grown woman,
in the thick of business life. Such women were not taken unawares. He
had just dismissed the whole affair from his mind on this basis when
Claire's telephone message came to him. Even now he marveled at the
sense of satisfaction that her appeal had given. But he had found no
savor in a situation that compelled him to interfere in Flint's program.
Such a move on his part was contrary to his standards, to his training
in comradeship, to all his acqui