red that one summer at the Royal Palisades Hotel in Atlantic
City he had become engaged to a slim-flanked one from Akron, Ohio. But
on the evening of the first day she had seen him in a bathing suit the
rebellious young girl and a bitterly disappointed and remonstrating
mother had departed on the Buck Eye for "points west."

There was almost something of the nudity of arm and leg he must have
presented to eighteen's tender sensibilities in Mr. Latz's expression
now as he sat well forward on the overstuffed chair, his overstuffed
knees strained apart, his face nude of all pretense and creased with
anxiety.

"That's about the way of it, isn't it?" he said again into the growing
silence.

Suddenly Mrs. Samstag's fingers were rigid at their task of lace making,
the scraping of the orchestral violin tearing the roaring noises in her
ears into ribbons of alternate sound and vacuum, as if she were closing
her ears and opening them, so roaringly the blood pounded.

"I--When a woman cares for--a man like--I did--Mr. Latz, she'll never
be happy until--she cares again--like that. I always say, once an
affectionate nature, always an affectionate nature."

"You mean," he said, leaning forward the imperceptible half inch that
was left of chair--"you mean--me--?"

The smell of bay rum came out greenly then as the moisture sprang out on
his scalp.

"I--I'm a home woman, Mr. Latz. You can put a fish in water, but you
cannot make him swim. That's me and hotel life."

At this somewhat cryptic apothegm Mr. Latz's knee touched Mrs.
Samstag's, so that he sprang back full of nerves at what he had not
intended.

"Marry me, Carrie," he said, more abruptly than he might have, without
the act of that knee to immediately justify.

She spread the lace out on her lap.

Ostensibly to the hotel lobby they were as casual as, "My mulligatawny
soup was cold to-night," or, "Have you heard the new one that Al Jolson
pulls at the Winter Garden?" But actually the roar was higher than ever
in Mrs. Samstag's ears and he could feel the plethoric red rushing in
flashes over his body.

"Marry me, Carrie," he said, as if to prove that his stiff lips could
repeat their incredible feat.

With a woman's talent for them, her tears sprang.

"Mr. Latz--"

"Louis," he interpolated, widely eloquent of eyebrow and posture.

"You're proposing, Louis!" She explained rather than asked, and placed
her hand to her heart so prettily that he wanted to crush i