izen and the Great Pleasure-Dog
Behemoth, involving Plans for Two New Homes_. 416

QUEED

I

_First Meeting between a citizen in Spectacles and the Great
Pleasure-Dog Behemoth; also of Charles Gardiner West, a Personage
at Thirty._

It was five of a November afternoon, crisp and sharp, and already
running into dusk. Down the street came a girl and a dog, rather a small
girl and quite a behemothian dog. If she had been a shade smaller, or he
a shade more behemothian, the thing would have approached a parody on
one's settled idea of a girl and a dog. She had enough height to save
that, but it was the narrowest sort of squeak.

The dog was of the breed which are said to come trotting into Alpine
monasteries of a winter's night with fat American travelers in their
mouths, frozen stiff. He was extremely large for his age, whatever that
was. On the other hand, the girl was small for her age, which was
twenty-four next month; not so much short, you understand, for she was
of a reasonable height, as of a dainty slimness, a certain exquisite
reticence of the flesh. She had cares and duties and even sober-sided
responsibilities in this world, beyond the usual run of girls. Yet her
hat was decidedly of the mode that year; her suit was smartly and
engagingly cut; her furs were glossy and black and big. Her face, it may
be said here as well as later, had in its time given pleasure to the
male sex, and some food for critical conversation to the female. A good
many of the young men whom she met along the way this afternoon appeared
distinctly pleased to speak to her.

The girl was Sharlee Weyland, and Sharlee was the short for Charlotte
Lee, as invented by herself some score of years before. One baby-name in
a hundred sticks through a lifetime, and hers was the one in that
particular hundred. Of the young men along the way, one was so lucky as
to catch her eye through a large plate-glass window. It was Semple and
West's window, the ground-floor one in the great new Commonwealth
Building, of which the town is rightly so proud, and the young man was
no other than West, Charles Gardiner himself. A smile warmed his
good-looking face when he met the eye of the girl and the dog; he waved
a hand at them. That done, he immediately vanished from the window and
reached for his hat and coat; gave hurried directions to a clerk and a
stenographer; and sallying forth, overtook the pair before they