she told him. "I wondered whether or
not you would feel it the thing for me to do. It is a unique
situation," she said in a slightly more animated tone--"not the
situation, but my calm betrayal of it. Usually my sort go along in
silence and take our bursts of truthful rebellion on our mothers'
shoulders or in sanitariums. I really feel a great deal better now
that I have told you." Her gray eyes were quite fearless in their
honesty as she glanced up. "I feel that I can settle down in an even
routine and be of more service to everyone."

"We'll be friends," he urged, impulsively. It seemed hard not to say
foolish, loverish little things, try to make her believe in miracles,
make wild and impossible rainbow plans, precluding any Gorgeous Girls
and newly remodelled Italian villas.

"I wanted to add a postscript," she interrupted. "That's only running
true to form, isn't it? Here it is: If you ever at any time, because
you are emotional and in many ways untried, find yourself unhappy and
at cross purposes, and try to lean on a sentimental crutch which
inclines in my direction--I shall leave this office just as they do in
novels. And I shall not come back, which they always do in novels.
This would deprive you of a good employee and myself of a good
position and be foolish all round. You men are no different from us
women; once a woman knows a man loves her she cannot quite hate him
even if her heart is another's. Instinctively she labels him as a
rainy-day proposition and during some wild thunderstorm--well, idiotic
things happen! Whereas if she never knew he cared she might go about
finding a mild mission in life. A man is the same; and since I have
trusted you with my secret, and that secret happens to concern
yourself, the logical consequence is that you will never quite hate me
because I care. In some moods you might even try telling yourself that
you cared, too. Then I should not only leave your employ but I should
stop caring."

She went on with the morning's mail. Outside, the office force was
stirring. Raps at the door and phone calls would soon begin.

"Would you really?" he asked, so soberly that Mary's hands trembled
and she blotted ink on her clean desk pad as she tried to make a
memorandum.

"Really. I never can bring myself to believe in warmed-over magic."

"Then I shall never have any such moods."

He answered a phone call and there fell upon the office an atmosphere
of strange peace which had been