yers for the sick, called on me this
morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his
duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think
he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature
of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to
me--condoning it, you know--and trying to patch up my peace with my
conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my
talent."

Everett laughed. "Oh! I'm afraid I'm not the person to call after such
a serious gentleman--I can't sustain the situation. At my best I don't
reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble
uses you will devote yourself?"

Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed:
"I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn't study
that method."

She laughed and went on nervously: "The parson's not so bad. His English
never offends me, and he has read Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, all five
volumes, and that's something. Then, he has been to New York, and that's
a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York;
Charley says you're just on from there. How does it look and taste and
smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons
of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what
does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or
have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden
Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes
of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided
aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?
What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink
there in the world nowadays? You see, I'm homesick for it all, from the
Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!" She was interrupted
by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her
discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met
in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in
his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in
the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became conscious that she was
looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back