hinking what a mistake it had been to leave New York. There he had
had but two friends with no possibility of getting any more. Here--it
was impossible to blink the fact any longer--he already had two, with at
least two more determinedly closing in on him. He had Fifi and he had
Buck--yes, Buck; the young lady Charles Weyland had offered him her
friendship this very day; and unless he looked alive he would wake up
some morning to find that Nicolovius also had captured him as a friend.

He was far better off in New York, where days would go by in which he
never saw Tim or Murphy Queed. And yet ... did he want to go back?

XIII

_"Taking the Little Doctor Down a Peg or Two": as performed for the
First and Only Time by Sharlee Weyland._

The Star that fought in its course for men through Sharlee Weyland was
of the leal and resolute kind. It did not swerve at a squall. Sharlee
had thought the whole thing out, and made up her mind. Gentle raillery,
which would do everything necessary in most cases, would be wholly
futile here. She must doff all gloves and give the little Doctor the
dressing-down of his life. She must explode a mine under that enormously
exaggerated self-esteem which swamped the young man's personality like a
goitre. Sharlee did not want to do this. She liked Mr. Queed, in a
peculiar sort of way, and yet she had to make it impossible for him ever
to speak to her again. Her nature was to give pleasure, and therefore
she was going to do her utmost to give him pain. She wanted him to like
her, and consequently she was going to insult him past forgiveness. And
she was not even sure that it was going to do him any good.

When her guest walked into her little back parlor that evening, Sharlee
was feeling very self-sacrificing and noble. However, she merely looked
uncommonly pretty and tremendously engrossed in herself. She was in
evening dress. It was Easter Monday, and at nine, as it chanced, she was
to go out under the escortage of Charles Gardiner West to some
forgathering of youth and beauty. But her costume was so perfectly
suited to the little curtain-raiser called Taking the Little Doctor Down
a Peg or Two, that it might have been appointed by a clever
stage-manager with that alone in mind. She was the haughty beauty, the
courted princess, graciously bestowing a few minutes from her crowding
fetes upon some fourth-rate dependant. And indeed the little Doctor,
with his prematurely old fa