er distress at the
scorched soup of the night before, was this new humiliation of
"brickbats;" naturally she forgot the "poor thing."

Maurice almost forgot her himself; but as he left the office in the
afternoon he did remember the coat. At the address which the red-cheeked
lady had given him, he found her card--"Miss Lily Dale"--below a letter
box in the tiled, untidy vestibule of a yellow-brick apartment house,
where he waited, grinning at the porcelain ornateness about him, for a
little jerking elevator to take him up to the fourth floor. There, in a
small, gay, clean parlor of starched lace curtains, and lithographs, and
rows of hyacinth bulbs just started in blue and purple glasses on the
window sill, he found the red-cheeked young lady, rather white-cheeked.
Indeed, there were traces of hastily wiped-away tears on her pretty
face.

"My friend, Mr. Batty, said I upset the boat," she said, taking the coat
out of the wardrobe and brushing it briskly with a capable little hand.

The coat reeked with perfumery, and Maurice said, "Phew!" to himself;
but threw it over his arm, and said that Mr. Batty had only himself to
blame. "A man ought to know enough not to let a lady move about in a
rowboat!"

"Won't you be seated?" Lily said; she lighted a cigarette, and shoved
the box over to him, across the varnished glitter of the table top.

Maurice, introducing himself--"My name's Curtis";--and, taking in all
the details of the comfortable, vulgar little room, sat down, took a
cigarette, and said it was a warm day for October; she said she hated
heat, and he said he liked winter best.... Then he saw a bruise on her
wrist and said: "Why, you gave yourself a dreadful knock, didn't you?
Was it on the rowlock?"

Her face dropped into sullen lines: "It wasn't the boat did it."

Maurice, with instant discretion, dropped the subject. But he was sorry
for her; she made him think of a beaten kitten. "You must take care of
that wrist," he said, his blue eyes full of sympathy. When he went away
he told himself he had spotted the big man as a brute the minute he saw
him. The "kitten" seemed to him so pathetic that he forgot Eleanor's
exquisiteness, and told her about the bruised wrist and the reeking
coat, and how pretty the girl was.

"I don't know anything vulgarer than perfumery!" his wife said, with a
delicate shrug.

Maurice agreed, adding, with a grin, that he had noticed that when
ladies were short on the odor of sancti