kept you, once, if I'd put on every screw?"

Thea hurried him along, talking rapidly, as if to get it over. "You
might have kept me in misery for a while, perhaps. I don't know. I have
to think well of myself, to work. You could have made it hard. I'm not
ungrateful. I was a difficult proposition to deal with. I understand
now, of course. Since you didn't tell me the truth in the beginning, you
couldn't very well turn back after I'd set my head. At least, if you'd
been the sort who could, you wouldn't have had to,--for I'd not have
cared a button for that sort, even then." She stopped beside a car that
waited at the curb and gave him her hand. "There. We part friends?"

Fred looked at her. "You know. Ten years."

"I'm not ungrateful," Thea repeated as she got into her cab.

"Yes," she reflected, as the taxi cut into the Park carriage road, "we
don't get fairy tales in this world, and he has, after all, cared more
and longer than anybody else." It was dark outside now, and the light
from the lamps along the drive flashed into the cab. The snowflakes
hovered like swarms of white bees about the globes.

Thea sat motionless in one corner staring out of the window at the cab
lights that wove in and out among the trees, all seeming to be bent upon
joyous courses. Taxicabs were still new in New York, and the theme of
popular minstrelsy. Landry had sung her a ditty he heard in some theater
on Third Avenue, about:

"But there passed him a bright-eyed taxi
With the girl of his heart inside."

Almost inaudibly Thea began to hum the air, though she was thinking of
something serious, something that had touched her deeply. At the
beginning of the season, when she was not singing often, she had gone
one afternoon to hear Paderewski's recital. In front of her sat an old
German couple, evidently poor people who had made sacrifices to pay for
their excellent seats. Their intelligent enjoyment of the music, and
their friendliness with each other, had interested her more than
anything on the programme. When the pianist began a lovely melody in the
first movement of the Beethoven D minor sonata, the old lady put out her
plump hand and touched her husband's sleeve and they looked at each
other in recognition. They both wore glasses, but such a look! Like
forget-menots, and so full of happy recollections. Thea wanted to put
her arms around them and ask them how they had been able to keep a
feeling like that, like a nosegay in a glass