hat it
ought not to be discountenanced. But he could feel nothing for it, save
an unconfessed pity that it would sleep that night in ignorance of his
glorious transit. He had never suspected there could be so many
thousands of people who took the world as a tame affair and slept
indifferent to young men with great things before them.

"If New York is like this," he said, with a flash of his old boyish
excitement, "what can I ever do without you?"

"But it isn't at all like this, and you'll do big things without me--or
with me, if I can help you."

"You will have to help me. Now that I've seen the beginning of the
world, I'm depending on you more than I thought I should when we
started."

"You will lose that."

"Will I? But it will be queer to see you as part of the world--no longer
the whole of it; to see how you stand out from the others. Perhaps the
rest of the world will be only a dingy background for you--you are all
color and life."

"You've made me feel like a lay figure," she laughed. Then, in a flash
of womanish curiosity, she ventured, "Have you ever thought me anything
but a shell of color?"

He stammered, blushing painfully.

"Oh, a real person--of course, certainly! A woman, yes--but when I think
of you as a woman, I'm scared, like those first times I saw you. I can't
help it. You may not believe it," he concluded with a burst of candor,
"but the truth is, I don't know women."

He was again embarrassed when she retorted, with her laugh:

"O youth! May you always know so much!"

"Well, to-morrow afternoon we shall be in New York," he said briskly,
when she had shut the deeps of her eyes from him. He had felt the need
to show that there were matters upon which he could speak with
understanding.

CHAPTER IX

A DINNER AT SEVEN-THIRTY

By five o'clock the next afternoon Ewing had ended his journey in an
upper room of the Stuyvesant Hotel. This hostelry flaunts an outworn
magnificence. Its hangings are dingy, its plenteous gilt is tarnished;
and it seems to live on memories of a past when fashion splendidly
thronged its corridors. But peace lies beyond the gloom of its portals,
and Ewing was glad to be housed from the dazing tumult outside. Nothing
reached him now but the muted rhythm of horses' feet on the asphalt
below, and this but recalled agreeably to him that his solitude was an
artificial thing of four walls. He had no wish to forget that the world
waited beyond his door.

He f