of the forenoon
and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the
student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious
frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was
beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.

Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a
number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.

One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in
the distant parlor, Fane said. "Now, what'll you bet that they won't
every one of 'em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to
bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there's no place like a hotel to
study 'em."

"I don't want to study them," said Gregory, harshly.

"Think Greek's more worth your while, or know 'em well enough already?"
Fane suggested.

"No, I don't know them at all," said the student.

"I don't believe," urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, "that there's
a girl in the house that you couldn't marry, if you gave your mind to
it."

Gregory twitched irascibly. "I don't want to marry them."

"Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don't know."

"I don't mean that," retorted the student. "But I've got other things to
think of."

"Don't you believe," the clerk modestly urged, "that it is natural for a
man--well, a young man--to think about girls?"

"I suppose it is."

"And you don't consider it wrong?"

"How, wrong?"

"Well, a waste of time. I don't know as I always think about wanting to
marry 'em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on 'em. There's
something about a girl that, well, you don't know what it is, exactly.
Take almost any of 'em," said the clerk, with an air of inductive
reasoning. "