but up at him.

"I wonder if you know, K.," she said, "what a lucky woman the woman will
be who marries you?"

He laughed good-humoredly.

"I wonder how long I could hypnotize her into thinking that."

He was still holding out the paper.

"I've had time to do a little thinking lately," she said, without
bitterness. "Palmer is away so much now. I've been looking back,
wondering if I ever thought that about him. I don't believe I ever did.
I wonder--"

She checked herself abruptly and took the paper from his hand.

"I'll go to see Tillie, of course," she consented. "It is like you to
have found her."

She sat down. Although she picked up the book that she had been reading
with the evident intention of discussing it, her thoughts were still on
Tillie, on Palmer, on herself. After a moment:--

"Has it ever occurred to you how terribly mixed up things are? Take this
Street, for instance. Can you think of anybody on it that--that things
have gone entirely right with?"

"It's a little world of its own, of course," said K., "and it has plenty
of contact points with life. But wherever one finds people, many or few,
one finds all the elements that make up life--joy and sorrow, birth and
death, and even tragedy. That's rather trite, isn't it?"

Christine was still pursuing her thoughts.

"Men are different," she said. "To a certain extent they make their own
fates. But when you think of the women on the Street,--Tillie,
Harriet Kennedy, Sidney Page, myself, even Mrs. Rosenfeld back in the
alley,--somebody else moulds things for us, and all we can do is to sit
back and suffer. I am beginning to think the world is a terrible place,
K. Why do people so often marry the wrong people? Why can't a man
care for one woman and only one all his life? Why--why is it all so
complicated?"

"There are men who care for only one woman all their lives."

"You're that sort, aren't you?"

"I don't want to put myself on any pinnacle. If I cared enough for
a woman to marry her, I'd hope to--But we are being very tragic,
Christine."

"I feel tragic. There's going to be another mistake, K., unless you stop
it."

He tried to leaven the conversation with a little fun.

"If you're going to ask me to interfere between Mrs. McKee and the
deaf-and-dumb book and insurance agent, I shall do nothing of the sort.
She can both speak and hear enough for both of them."

"I mean Sidney and Max Wilson. He's mad about her, K.; and, because
she