so sharp and deeply bitten in as to be, she fancied,
ineffaceable, was in the main confused. She must have called upon ten or
a dozen advertisers in various suburban districts of the city (she
avoided addresses that were too near home and names where she suspected
hers might be known). Her composite impression was of flat thin voices
which she could imagine in excitement becoming shrill; of curious
appraising stares; of a vast amount of garrulous irrelevancy; of a note
of injury that one who could profess so little equipment beyond good will
should so disappoint the expectation her first appearance had aroused.
The background was a room--it seemed to have been in every case the
same--expensively overfurnished, inexpressive, ill-fitting its uses, like
a badly chosen ready-made coat. The day was not without its humors, or
what would have been humors if her spirit could have rebounded to them.
Chiefly, the violent antagonism she found aroused in two or three cases
by the color of her hair.

The residuum of her pilgrimages was three addresses where she might call
about the middle of next week, in person or by telephone, to learn the
advertiser's decision. Well it would convince Wallace Hood that she was
in earnest. That was something.

Wallace's coming to tea became, as the day wore on, more and more
something to look forward to. All the things about him which in more
resilient hours she had found irritating or absurd, his neutrality, his
appropriateness, his steady unimaginative way of going always one step
at a time, seemed now precisely his greatest merits. The thought of tea
in his company even aroused a faint appetite for food in her and lent
zest to her preparations for it. When she stopped at the neighborhood
caterer's shop for supplies she bought some tea cakes in addition to the
sandwiches she had ordered in the morning. She had managed to get home
in good enough season to restore the drawing-room somewhat to its
inhabited appearance, to set out her tea table, put on her kettle, and
then go up-stairs and change her dress for something that was not wilted
by the day's unusual heat. She was ready then to present before Wallace
an _ensemble_ which should match pretty well her tone at the telephone
this morning.

But when she answered the ring she supposed was his and flinging open the
door saw Graham Stannard there instead, she got a jarring shock which her
overstrung nerves were in no condition to endure.

"I per