ing down the broad highway; or
else we would be sanitarium devotees, neurasthenic muddles. So we
strike our brave pose and call ourselves superwomen, advanced
feminists, and all the rest of the feeble rubbish until the right man
comes along. Sometimes he never comes--so we keep right ahead, growing
dry as dust at heart and even fooling ourselves. I did. But it took
your wife to show me my smug conceit, my fancy that I was a bulwark of
commerce, so proper, so perfect! She showed me that I was just plain
woman making the best of having been born into the twentieth century!
There is a Gorgeous Girl in all of us, Steve. So I can't advise or
comfort or do any of the things I used to--a bag of tricks we women in
business have adopted to make the heart loneliness the less. Go away
and make good! That is just what she told you--isn't it? You will
never believe in any of us again. And I don't know that you should,
after all. For cave men need Gorgeous Girls."

Steve was laughing down at her. "True--but they need the right
Gorgeous Girl. I'm glad you have finally told the truth; I always
suspected it. You have over-emphasized it somewhat--and the woman I
married was unfairly over-emphasized as well. But in the main, what
you have said is the truth. I assure you I am twice as glad to have an
incentive instead of a lady directress. And I want you to be
helpless--if you can; and fluffy--if you will! Don't you see that you
are the right Gorgeous Girl--and she was the wrong one--and I'm the
culprit? Why, Mary, the worst thing you could do would be to descend
upon me in curl papers under a pink net cap. Even that prospect does
not frighten me!"

"Are you going away?" she asked, shyly.

"Not far--nothing spectacular or romantic. I'm done with that.
Beatrice goes West, I believe. She is quite happy. She is going to New
York first to get her divorce wardrobe. It is her father I pity--he
has to face another son-in-law," Steve laughed. "I am merely going to
work for an old and reliable firm--use my nest egg for a house. A
brown-shingled house, I think, with plain yard and a few ambitious
shrubs blooming along the walks. I don't know what they will be; I
leave that to you!"

Luke wondered why he was not called upon for action, but he wondered
still more as Mary came presently to ask that he tell Steve
good-night. Her gray eyes were like captured sunrise.

"Luke, dear," she said in as feminine a manner as Beatrice might have
done, "don