his hand and
looking at her with a boyish and diffident gallantry in amusing
contrast with his stern and cynical countenance, and she had realized
that he had impulsively followed her, something had stirred within her
that she had attributed to a superficial recrudescence of her old love
of adventure, of her keen desire for novelty at any cost. Amused at
both herself and him, she had suddenly decided, while he was effecting
an entrance to her house, to invite him into the library and take
advantage of this break in the monotonous life she had decreed should
be her portion while she remained in New York.

She had found him more personally attractive than she had expected.
Judge Trent, whom she had deftly drawn out, had told her that he was a
young man of whom, according to Dinwiddie, great things were expected
in the literary world; his newspaper career, brilliant as it was, being
regarded merely as a phase in his progress; he had not yet "found
himself." After that she had read his column attentively.

But she had not been prepared for a powerful and sympathetic
personality, that curious mixture of naivete and hard sophistication,
and she had ascribed her interest in him to curiosity in exploring what
to her was a completely foreign type. In her own naivete it had never
occurred to her that men outside her class were gentlemen as she
understood the term, and she still supposed Clavering to be exceptional
owing to his birth and breeding. It had given her a distinct
satisfaction, the night of the dinner, to observe that he lost nothing
by contact with men who were indubitably of her own world. There was
no snobbery in her attitude. She had always been too secure in her own
exalted state for snobbery, too protected from climbers to conceive the
"I will maintain" impulse, and she had escaped at birth that
overpowering sense of superiority that carks the souls of high and low
alike. But it was the first time she had ever had the opportunity to
judge by any standards but those in which she had been born and passed
her life. As for Clavering, he was a gentleman, and that was the end
of that phase of the matter as far as she was concerned.

It was only tonight that she had been conscious of a certain youthful
eagerness as she paced up and down the hall waiting to hear him run up
the steps. She had paused once and laughed at herself as she realized
that she was acting like a girl expecting her lover, when she was
me