th you."

He smiled back at her, all his former suavity regained. She slid into
her seat again. Her mind was recalling vividly the one other time in her
life when she had grappled vigorously with the masculine spirit of
domination, and come away victorious. This time she had been defeated
and she had impulses toward relief and fear. She looked up suddenly and
trapped a solicitous glance from Stillman that rather annoyed her. And
it struck her, as she mentally compared Stillman with most of the men of
her acquaintance, how far he could have loomed above them if he had had
the will for such a performance. As it was he fell somewhat beneath them
in a curious, indefinable way. Had he been too finely tempered by
circumstances or had the flame of life lacked the proper heat for fusing
his virtues effectively? For the moment she found Flint's forthright
insolence more tolerable than Stillman's sterile deference. Suddenly she
began to think of home, not with any sense of security, but as something
unpleasant, dark, disquieting....

CHAPTER XII

Toward six o'clock one afternoon in late February Ned Stillman, making
his way from the business district at California and Montgomery Streets
toward his club, suddenly remembered a forgotten luncheon engagement for
that day with Lily Condor.

"Well," he muttered at once, "I'm in for it now! I guess I might as well
swing out and see her and get the thing over with."

It was curious of late how often he was given to muttering. Previously,
petty annoyances had not moved him to these half-audible and solitary
comments which he had always found contemptuously amusing in others. He
wondered whether this new trick was the result of his business ventures,
his sly charities, or his approach toward the suggestive age of forty.
Associating the name of Lily Condor with his covert charities, he was
almost persuaded that they lay back of this preposterous habit. And the
more he thought about it the more he muttered and became convinced that
Lily Condor was usually the topic of these vocal self-communings.

Ned Stillman had always prided himself upon his sense of personal
freedom concerning the trivial circumstances of life. Of course, like
any man of sensibility, he was bound by the chains that deeper impulses
forge, but he had never been hampered by any restraints directed at his
ordinary uprisings and downsittings. In short, he had answered the beck
and nod of no man, much less a woman,