ty consolidated the favourable impression she
had formed.

* * * * *

The gods are just. For every ill which they inflict they also supply a
compensation. It seems good to them that individuals in big cities
shall be lonely, but they have so arranged that, if one of these
individuals does at last contrive to seek out and form a friendship
with another, that friendship shall grow more swiftly than the tepid
acquaintanceships of those on whom the icy touch of loneliness has
never fallen. Within a week Elizabeth was feeling that she had known
this James Renshaw Boyd all her life.

And yet there was a tantalizing incompleteness about his personal
reminiscences. Elizabeth was one of those persons who like to begin a
friendship with a full statement of their position, their previous
life, and the causes which led up to their being in this particular
spot at this particular time. At their next meeting, before he had had
time to say much on his own account, she had told him of her life in
the small Canadian town where she had passed the early part of her
life; of the rich and unexpected aunt who had sent her to college for
no particular reason that anyone could ascertain except that she
enjoyed being unexpected; of the legacy from this same aunt, far
smaller than might have been hoped for, but sufficient to send a
grateful Elizabeth to New York, to try her luck there; of editors,
magazines, manuscripts refused or accepted, plots for stories; of life
in general, as lived down where the Arch spans Fifth Avenue and the
lighted cross of the Judson shines by night on Washington Square.

Ceasing eventually, she waited for him to begin; and he did not
begin--not, that is to say, in the sense the word conveyed to
Elizabeth. He spoke briefly of college, still more briefly of
Chicago--which city he appeared to regard with a distaste that made
Lot's attitude towards the Cities of the Plain almost kindly by
comparison. Then, as if he had fulfilled the demands of the most
exacting inquisitor in the matter of personal reminiscence, he began to
speak of the play.

The only facts concerning him to which Elizabeth could really have
sworn with a clear conscience at the end of the second week of their
acquaintance were that he was very poor, and that this play meant
everything to him.

The statement that it meant everything to him insinuated itself so
frequently into his conversation that it weighed on Eliza