used to the Knights of the
Pink Parlor. That he is good looking is not what seems so queer,
because I suppose there _are_ good-looking hired men as well as
good-looking street car conductors or undertakers. He is so
understandable--he is like you and Anne and Dad. And he knows so much
about everything! He must have gone to college--he talks just like a
college man. But once when I hinted he smiled and told me that he was
'still a student in the college of Experience, where after all one
could learn more than at even the great universities.'

"He is Mysterious. After I've been with him I plan it all out--what he
must have been and why he fell to the level of this sort of work; then
the next time I see him he says something that makes me change all my
ideas. I am sure he is concealing something--he simply will not say
one word about himself! I don't believe it's anything as bad as murder
or forgery or--anything like that, because he has such honest eyes, and
they look right straight through you. It's probably some sorrow or--or
disappointment. Sometimes his eyes look very tired, as though they had
seen some terrible tragedy, though mostly always they're just jolly.

"He's wonderful with Nonie and Davy--they adore him. He thinks of so
many nice things for them to do. He says once he was a scoutmaster in
the Boy Scouts. I think he almost gave something away then, for, after
he said it, he looked so funny and wouldn't say another word.

"He treats me as though I was another boy just a little older than
Davy. And after the silly men we knew in college it's a relief to find
anyone like Peter Hyde, even though he is a hired man. I suppose it's
because he's probably had a hard time--has had to make his way, he's
had all the nonsense knocked out of him! I am sure, if one could teach
him to dance and then set him down in the middle of your mother's
living-room you'd all go crazy over him. Now isn't that some Hired
Man? Dear me, I spend more time wondering about him! Then I laugh at
myself. Do you remember the Russian who came to college last year--how
we all thought he must be a Russian prince and then we found out he'd
been born on the Lower East Side?"

* * * * *

There were other doubts concerning Peter Hyde that Nancy did _not_
confide to Claire. For the past two years and more, in Nancy's honest
soul, all men between twenty-one and forty were divided into two
classes; those