ore necessary that he should be placed within range of
someone with whom he cared to talk. He rarely lent himself to the usual
run of social badinage; but retired into his shell whenever it became
the dominant note of the conversation. A man of his bulk and prominence
and potential boredom was an object of hospitable consideration. He
could always talk to Beatrix, for she never chattered. Therefore he was
generally to be found somewhere within the conversational radius of
Beatrix Dane.

The tea table of Beatrix, moreover, had become one of the focal points
of his New York life. He liked the cheery, informal atmosphere of the
house whose old-fashioned austerity was tempered with a dash of modern
frivolity; he liked the people he met there, people too assured of their
own social position to be touchy upon slight points of social
precedence. Most of all, he liked Beatrix Dane, herself. In the gay,
chattering multitude among whom she moved, her own steadfast quietness
stood out in bold relief, and it answered to certain traits of his own
Puritanism. It was not that she was dull, or overfreighted with
conscience. She frisked with the others of her kind; but her friskiness
was intermittent and never frivolous. To Beatrix Dane, pleasure was an
interlude, never the sole end and aim of life. And, on her own side,
Beatrix felt a thorough admiration for the clean-minded, clean-bodied
singer, a thorough reliance upon his judgment and upon his loyalty to
anyone to whom he vouchsafed his friendship.

This had been the relation between them, on the evening of the concert
for the Fresh Air Fund, a relation whose cordial matter-of-factness was
in no way disturbed by the potent spell of Thayer's voice. Beatrix had
spent much of her life in the open air; she was too healthy to be given
to self-analysis. She admitted to herself the wonderful power of
Thayer's voice, the passionate appeal of certain of his songs; but she
made a curiously sharp distinction between the man and the voice. The
one might be a strong guiding force in the current of her life; the
other was a rising tide that swept her from her moorings and left her
drifting to and fro over stormy seas. On the night of the Fresh Air Fund
concert, for the first time in her experience, these two personalities
had become inextricably intermingled. As she had said, she had never
before realized the possibilities of either Thayer or his voice.

Everything had conspired to produce the