May be buried together or hurled apart,
But the strong will battle in his degree,
For--"The woman I love shall be proud of me!"

There were men and women, and music and flowers, and some of the people
had intelligence, and I drifted about at the Laffins' party, and rather
enjoyed myself. Of course I wanted to see the woman a fancy for whom
had gripped Harlson so hardly. I had forgotten about her until, with a
pleasant and clever person upon my arm, I had found something to eat
and had come upstairs again, and released her to another. I wandered
into an adjacent room, and there ran upon Harlson among a group. I was
presented to Miss Cornish.

I do not know how to describe a woman. This one, whom I have known
better than any other woman in the world, is most difficult of all for
me to picture. She stood there, not uninterested altogether, for, no
doubt, Harlson had been telling her already of his closest friend, his
lieutenant in many things, and I had an opportunity to study her with
all closeness as we exchanged the commonplaces. I understood, when I
saw her, how it was that he had referred to her so absurdly as a little
brown streak of a thing. Little she was, assuredly, and brown, and so
slender, that his simile was not bad, but the brownness and the
slenderness were by no means all there was noticeable of her. She was
not imposing, this woman, but she was not commonplace. Supple of
figure she was, and there were the big eyes this stricken friend of
mine had told me of, and rather pronounced eyebrows, and her lips were
full and red, and there was that fullness of the chin, or, rather, the
vague dream or hint or vision of a daintily double chin at fifty, which
means so much, but the forehead was what a woman's should be, and the
glance of the eyes was clean and pure, though, in a clever woman's way,
observant and comprehensive. It was a cultivated and fascinating woman
whom I met.

We talked together, and Grant Harlson looked on gratified, and she
seemed to like me. She made me feel, in her own way, that she liked me
because she knew of me, and as we were talking I felt that she was
paying, unconsciously, the greatest compliment she could to the man
beside us. I knew it was because of the other, and of something that
he had said of me, that she was so readily on terms of comradeship.
And I knew, in the same connection, and from the same reasoning, that
she had already begun to care as much for him a