ce was experienced; and one of the conclusions she drew
from her experience was that when a man says, "I'd take you for anything
you wanted me to," he may mean it or, he may not; but, if he does, he
will not postpone the first opportunity to say something more. Little
affairs, once begun, must be warmed quickly; for if they cool they are
dead.

But Alice was not thinking of Arthur Russell. When she tossed away the
carnations she likewise tossed away her thoughts of that young man. She
had been like a boy who sees upon the street, some distance before him,
a bit of something round and glittering, a possible dime. He hopes it is
a dime, and, until he comes near enough to make sure, he plays that it
is a dime. In his mind he has an adventure with it: he buys something
delightful. If he picks it up, discovering only some tin-foil which has
happened upon a round shape, he feels a sinking. A dulness falls upon
him.

So Alice was dull with the loss of an adventure; and when the laughter
of other girls reached her, intermittently, she had not sprightliness
enough left in her to be envious of their gaiety. Besides, these
neighbours were ineligible even for her envy, being of another caste;
they could never know a dance at the Palmers', except remotely, through
a newspaper. Their laughter was for the encouragement of snappy young
men of the stores and offices down-town, clerks, bookkeepers, what
not--some of them probably graduates of Frincke's Business College.

Then, as she recalled that dark portal, with its dusty stairway mounting
between close walls to disappear in the upper shadows, her mind drew
back as from a doorway to Purgatory. Nevertheless, it was a picture
often in her reverie; and sometimes it came suddenly, without sequence,
into the midst of her other thoughts, as if it leaped up among them from
a lower darkness; and when it arrived it wanted to stay. So a traveller,
still roaming the world afar, sometimes broods without apparent reason
upon his family burial lot: "I wonder if I shall end there."

The foreboding passed abruptly, with a jerk of her breath, as the
street-lamp revealed a tall and easy figure approaching from the north,
swinging a stick in time to its stride. She had given Russell up--and he
came.

"What luck for me!" he exclaimed. "To find you alone!"

Alice gave him her hand for an instant, not otherwise moving. "I'm glad
it happened so," she said. "Let's stay out here, shall we? Do you think