ised deferentially to her feet, and looked up to catch the lonely and
bewildered eyes of George Harley. They were outside their mutual hotel.
What more natural and courteous than that he should escort her into the
hotel with many expressions of anxious regret, ascend with her in the
elevator to their mutual floor, linger with her for a polite few
minutes in the sunlight that poured through the passage windows and
leave her to hurry finally to her room thrilling under the recollection
of two admiring eyes and a lingering handshake? She, even she, then, at
her time of life, plump and partridge-like as she was, could inspire
the interest and approval of a man. It was wonderful. It was absurd. It
was ... altogether too good to be true! Later, after she had spent a
half-amused, half-wistful quarter of an hour in front of her glass,
seeing inescapable white hairs and an irremediable double chin, she had
gone down to the dining room for lunch. All the tables being occupied,
what more natural or disconcerting than for this modern Raleigh to rise
and rather clumsily and eagerly beg that she would share the one just
allotted to himself.

To the elderly man, whose nose had been too close to the grindstone to
permit of dalliance, and who now, monied and retired, found himself
terribly alone in the pale sun of St. Martin's Summer, and to the
little charming woman of forty, led back to life by an ardent and
impetuous girl, this quite ordinary everyday incident, which seemed to
them to be touched by romance, came at a moment when both were
pathetically receptive. They arranged to meet again, they met again,
and one fine afternoon while Joan was at a theater with Alice, he spoke
and she listened. It was in the more than usually hotel-like
drawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having tea, and the
band was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the jingle of a musical
comedy, the movement of waiters. Under the leaves of a tame palm which
once had known the gorgeous freedom of a semi-tropical forest he
stumbled over a proposal, the honest, fearful, pulsating proposal of a
man who conceived that he was trying hopelessly to hitch his wagon to a
star, and she, tremulous, amazed, and on the verge of tears, accepted
him. Hers presumably the dreadful ordeal of facing an incredulous
daughter and two sarcastic parents-in-law and his of standing for
judgment before them,--argument, discussion, satire, irony, abuse
even,--a quiet and dete