than a courteous habit; it was a genuine
tribute of admiration. I admired her beauty, her impeccable bearing, her
frock, her furs, her intellect, the ease and distinction of her triumph.
She left me crushed; yet it was a privilege to have known her--to have
wooed her, won her, lost her; and now to have received my _coup de
grace_ from her competent, disdainful hands. I wished her well, knowing
the wish superfluous. In this, if nothing else, she resembled Susan--she
did not need me; she could stand alone. It was her tragedy, in the
French classic manner, that she must. Would it also in another manner,
in a deeper and--I can think of no homelier word--more cosmic sense,
prove to be Susan's?

But my own stuffy problem drama, whether tragic or absurd, had now
reached a crisis and developed its final question: How in the absence of
Susan to stand at all?

XI

From her interview with Gertrude, Susan went straight on to Phil's
rooms, not even stopping to consider the possible proprieties involved.
But, five minutes before her arrival, Phil had been summoned to the
Graduates Club to receive a long-distance call from his Boston
publisher; and it was Jimmy Kane who answered her knock and opened the
study door. He had been in conference with Phil on his private problems
and Phil had asked him to await his return. All this he thought it
courteous to explain to the peach of a girl before him, whose presence
at the door puzzled him mightily, and whose disturbing eyes held his, he
thought, rather too intimately and quizzically for a stranger's.

She could hardly be some graduate student in philosophy; she was too
young and too flossy for that. "Flossy," in Jimmy's economical
vocabulary, was a symbol for many subtle shades of meaning: it implied,
for any maiden it fitted, an elegance not too cold to be alluring; the
possession of that something more than the peace of God which a friend
told Emerson always entered her heart when she knew herself to be well
dressed. Flossy--to generalize--Jimmy had not observed the women
graduate students to be, though he bore them no ill will. To be truly
flossy was, after all, a privilege reserved for a chosen few, born to a
certain circle which Jimmy had never sought to penetrate.

One--and a curiously entrancing specimen--of the chosen evidently stood
watching him now, and he wished that her entire self-possession did not
so utterly imperil his own. What was she doing alone, anyway, this
soci