k upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event
proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be
no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie there might have
been perhaps more passion and less conscience in his treatment of the
situation, but the humour of the philosopher had for many years replaced
in his nature the ardour of the lover. What he gave to her was the
inflexible code of honour which he observed in his association with his
own sex.

At Fortieth Street he was about to turn back again when he was arrested
by the sound of his own name called by a passing voice, and looking up
he saw Perry Bridewell spring from a cab which had hastily driven up to
the sidewalk.

"Wait a bit, will you, Adams?" said Perry, waving one heavily gloved
hand while he reached up with the other to pay the driver. "You're the
very man I'm after," he added an instant later as he turned from the
curbing, "so if you don't mind I'll walk a couple of blocks in your
direction. I'd just got into my dinner clothes," he explained, fastening
his fur-lined overcoat more snugly across his chest, "when I found that
Miss Wilde was going down alone to Gramercy Park. That's where I've come
from, and now I'm rushing back to keep an engagement Gerty has made for
dinner. I'll be hanged if I know where she's taking me--it's all one to
me, half the time I forget to ask whose house we're going to until I
bolt into the drawing-room. Beastly life, this everlasting eating in
other people's houses."

His tone was one of amiable discontentment, but there was a look of
positive annoyance upon his handsome face, and he turned presently to
regard his companion with an enquiry which might have been darkly
furtive had not the luminous publicity in which he moved rendered the
smallest of his mental processes so brilliantly overt. It was
immediately plain to Adams that the jerky sentences were shot out at
random in order that Perry's slow mind might gain a larger space in
which to grope for the word he really wanted. There was something
evidently behind it all, and until the situation should disclose itself
they walked on in an embarrassed and waiting silence. In his top hat and
his mink-lined overcoat Perry presented an ample dignity which his
companion found almost overpowering in its male magnificence. That
hesitation should manifest itself amid such a pageantry of personality
reminded Adams of the beggars in the old nursery r