leave you. Felt just like rambling along."

"Well, be firm."

"What?"

"Be firm."

"Now just what did he mean by that?" he said to himself as he tripped
down the stairs and out. He puzzled more over this advice as he hastened
uptown. Why had Doris come, abruptly and without notification? The more
he thought of it, the more he believed he understood the reason of
Granning's warning. Doris had come to him with some new proposition, an
investment for quick returns or an opening along lines of increasing
salaries. The open surface-car with its cargo of coatless men and
shirt-waisted women went pounding up the Avenue, hurrying him toward
Doris.

He would have been at loss to define to himself his real feelings.
Despite the sudden awakening in her, the delirious quality of romance
had not returned to him. Memories of another face and other hours had
ended that. Yet there was a solid feeling of doing the right thing, of
playing square by Doris, and of a responsibility well performed. In the
long, crowded, heated weeks there were long intervals when he forgot her
entirely. Yet when he saw her or opened her letters, poignant with
solicitude and faith, he felt his imagination kindle, if but for the
moment.

He had reached the self-conscious stage in youth when he looked upon
himself as supernaturally old and tried in the furnace of experience. He
quieted the dormant longings in his heart by assuring himself that he
now took a different view of marriage, a more significant one as a grave
social step. The less he felt the romance of their relations, the more
he acknowledged the solid supplementary qualities which Doris would
bring him as his companion, as associate and organizer of the home.

That he could not give her all that she now poured out unreservedly to
him, gave him at times a twinge of pity and compassion. She was so keen
to progress, to broaden the outlook of her views, to be of real service
to him. There were moments in her letters of inner revelations that
stirred him almost with the guilty feeling of surprising what was not
his to see. The idea of an early marriage would have been unbearable,
yet as a possibility of the future it seemed to him an eminently wise
and just procedure.

At the Drake mansion his ring was answered by a caretaker, who came
doubtfully to let him in, pausing to search for the electric buttons. In
the anteroom and down the vistas of the salons, everything was bare and
draped in dust