e a year."

"Bobby!"

"Sarah Maria!"

"Don't make fun of me because I was named for a spinster aunt. I can't
help my name."

"No; it's past help. I'd change it, if I were you. Just think how it
would sound at the altar, while the alteration was going on! 'I, Sarah
Maria, take thee--'"

Sally interposed hurriedly.

"But, to go back to Beatrix, if you feel in this way about Mr. Lorimer,
why don't you do something about it?"

"Do what, for example?"

"Speak to her father, or something."

Bobby's answer had an accent of utter gravity which somehow belied the
frivolous form of his words.

"Sally, I'll give you a new proverb, one I have found useful at times.
Put not thy finger into thy neighbor's pie, lest it get stuck there
permanently."

For the next few blocks, the silence between them was unbroken. Sally
nodded to an occasional acquaintance, and Bobby, without lifting his
eyes from the ground, seconded her salute with the mechanical raising of
his hat which good breeding demands. Few conventions are more
exasperatingly impersonal than the bow and smile of the average social
being.

"But I love Beatrix," Sally said inconsequently, after an interval.

"I, too."

For the moment, both voices had lost their customary tone of light
banter. Bobby broke the next pause.

"Couldn't you say something, Sally?"

"I wish I could; but it is no use. Beatrix hasn't the least respect for
my opinion. She thinks I am only a child, and, moreover, once upon a
time, I urged her to marry Mr. Lorimer. Of course, that was before any
of this came out about him; but I hate to go into details with her, and,
if I don't she will think it's nothing but a whim."

"What do you care what she thinks?"

Sally shifted her eyes from the apartment houses on Eighth Avenue to
Bobby's face.

"Bobby, I am afraid of Beatrix," she confessed. "She is built on a
larger frame than I am, and we both of us are quite aware of the fact."

"It may be a part of her capacious frame to risk her life in marrying
Sidney Lorimer," Bobby grumbled; "but, for my part, I prefer smaller
women."

Sally faced him suddenly.

"Bobby! You don't mean you think he will kill her sometime when he is
drunk?"

"No such luck! In the intervals, he will adore her and treat her like a
princess; but he won't spare her the anxiety and the shame of knowing he
is liable to take too much at any reception to which they may send an
acceptance. You haven't seen men as I hav