n her--that Mr. Feuerstein was a very
grand person indeed, and that he was condescending to be profoundly
smitten of her charms.

She was the "catch" of Avenue A, taking prospects and looks together,
and the men she knew had let her rule them. In Mr. Feuerstein she had
found what she had been unconsciously seeking with the Idealismus of
genuine youth--a man who compelled her to look far up to him, a man
who seemed to her to embody those vague dreams of a life grand and
beautiful, away off somewhere, which are dreamed by all young people,
and by not a few older ones, who have less excuse for not knowing where
happiness is to be found. He spent the whole evening with her; Mrs.
Liebers and Sophie, with whom she had come, did not dare interrupt her
pleasure, but had to stay, yawning and cross, until the last strain of
Home, Sweet Home.

At parting he pressed her hand. "I have been happy," he murmured in a
tone which said, "Mine is a sorrow-shadowed soul that has rarely tasted
happiness."

She glanced up at him with ingenuous feeling in her eyes and managed to
stammer: "I hope we'll meet again."

"Couldn't I come down to see you Sunday evening?"

"There's a concert in the Square. If you're there I might see you."

"Until Sunday night," he said, and made her feel that the three
intervening days would be for him three eternities.

She thought of him all the way home in the car, and until she fell
asleep. His sonorous name was in her mind when she awoke in the
morning; and, as she stood in the store that day, waiting on the
customers, she looked often at the door, and, with the
childhood-surviving faith of youth in the improbable and impossible,
hoped that he would appear. For the first time she was definitely
discontented with her lot, was definitely fascinated by the idea that
there might be something higher and finer than the simple occupations
and simple enjoyments which had filled her life thus far.

In the evening after supper her father and mother left her and her
brother August in charge, and took their usual stroll for exercise and
for the profound delight of a look at their flat-houses--those
reminders of many years of toil and thrift. They had spent their youth,
she as cook, he as helper, in one of New York's earliest delicatessen
shops. When they had saved three thousand dollars they married and put
into effect the plan which had been their chief subject of conversation
every day and every even