l enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the
training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I
was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony
Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course,
knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me----Course I'm
terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and
wanting to talk to everybody about everything."

"Yes. Yes. Of course I'm abominably slangy, too. I wonder if every one
isn't, except in books.... We've left our house a little unfinished,
Carl."

"I'm afraid we'll have to, blessed. We'll have to be going. It's past
seven, now; and we must be sure to catch the 8.09 and get back to town
about nine."

"I can't tell you how sorry I am we must leave our house in the
wilds."

"You really have enjoyed it?" He was cleaning the last of the dishes
with snow, and packing them away. "Do you know," he said, cautiously,
"I always used to feel that a girl--you say you aren't in society, but
I mean a girl like you--I used to think it was impossible to play with
such a girl unless a man was rich, which I excessively am not, with my
little money tied up in the Touricar. Yet here we have an all-day
party, and it costs less than three really good seats at the theater."

"I know. Phil is always saying that he is too poor to have a good
time, and yet his grandmother left him fifteen thousand dollars
capital in his own right, besides his allowance from his father and
his salary from the law firm; and he infuriates me sometimes--aside
from the tactlessness of the thing--by quite plainly suggesting that
I'm so empty-headed that I won't enjoy going out with him unless he
spends a lot of money and makes waiters and ushers obsequious. There
are lots of my friends who think that way, both the girls and the men.
They never seem to realize that if they were just human beings, as you
and I have been to-day, and not hide-bound members of the
dance-and-tea league, they could beat that beastly artificial old
city.... Phil once told me that _no_ man--mind you, no one at
all--could possibly marry on less than fifteen thousand dollars a
year. Simply proved it beyond a question."

"That lets me out."

"Phil said that no one could possibly live on the West Side--of course
the fact that he and I are both living on the West Side doesn't
count--and the cheapest good apartments near Fifth Avenue cost four
thousand dollars a year