to black, and makes your
eyes look like----"

"Mr. Piersoll!" announced the man.

His look still engaged her as she floated forward to greet the tall,
pleasant-faced, alert young man with tumbled yellow hair who now
entered. Not until he heard his own name did he relinquish her to
acknowledge the word of introduction.

A moment later the father of Mrs. Laithe strolled in and Ewing was again
introduced, this time to a stoutish man with a placid, pink face, scanty
hair going from yellow to white--arranged over his brow with scrupulous
economy--and a closely cut mustache of the same ambiguous hue. He was a
man who gracefully confessed fifty years to all but the better informed.
Ewing felt himself under the scrutiny of a pair of very light gray eyes
as Bartell took his hand, tentatively at first, then with a grip of
entire cordiality. One may suspect that this gentleman had looked
forward with mild apprehension to a dinner meeting with the latest
protege of his impulsive daughter. The youth's demeanor, however, so
quickly caused his barbaric past to be forgotten that, by the time they
were at table, his host had said to him, prefacing one of his best
anecdotes, "Of course you know that corner table on the Cafe de la Paix
terrace...."

Ewing floated dreamily on the stream of talk; laughing, chatty talk,
spiced with suggestive strange names; blithe gossip of random
happenings. He was content to feel its flow beneath him and rather
resented the efforts to involve him in it, preferring to listen and to
look. But he was courteously groped for by the others and compelled to
response as the dinner progressed.

Piersoll mentioned his drawings pleasantly and engaged him for dinner at
a club the following evening. "I'll call for you at the Stuyvesant about
six," he said, when Ewing had accepted. "I must have a look at your
stuff. Don't dress; we dine in our working clothes at the Monastery."

The father of Mrs. Laithe warned Ewing to beware of worry in his new
surroundings.

"Let life carry you, my boy. That's my physiology in a nutshell. Don't
try to lug the world about. The people who tell you that life in New
York is a strain haven't learned rational living. Worry kills, but I
never worry, and I find town idyllic. Clarence was born to worry:
result, dyspepsia and nervous breakdown. My daughter worries. She goes
into side streets looking for trouble, and when she finds it she keeps
it. That's wrong. Life is whatever we see