ng gentlemen
of America whom I liked exceedingly. One Mr. Phillips Taylor took me
by my heart with a great force when, as we were all seated on the
steps of the wide porch eating the promised sandwich and consuming
breath for another dance in a very few minutes, he said to me:

"Say, Mr. Robert Carruthers, my mater wants to see you over in the
east card room directly. She says she had it on with your father in
their dancing school days and it was only by the intervention of some
sort of love ruckus that you and I are not brothers or maybe what
would be worse, brother and sister. If that had happened you would
have had to be it. I wouldn't. But that's not our quarrel."

"You couldn't have been a woman unless you had received a much better
finishing polish before being sent to bless the earth, Phil, dear,"
said that funny Mademoiselle Mildred Summers, and that Mr. Phillips
Taylor returned the insult by lifting her off of her feet and gliding
her halfway across the porch verandah in the beginning of one tango
dance to the music that was again to be heard from the hall within the
building.

"Mildred and Phil fight like aborigines, and their love for combat
will lead to matrimony in their early youth if they are not reconciled
to each other soon," said lovely Sue as she fitted herself into my
arms for our tango.

"After this dance with you will you lead me to that Madam Taylor, the
friend of my father, beautiful Sue?" I asked of her. "It makes happy
my heart to see one who loved him." And as I spoke, the longing for my
father that will ever be in my heart made a sadness in my voice and a
dimness in my eyes.

"I think everybody loved him just as we are all beginning to--to like
you, Bobby dear," said that sweet girl as she smiled up at me in a way
that sent the dimness in my eyes back to my heart.

"I am very grateful that you like me, lovely Sue," I said with great
humility. "I will endeavor to win and deserve more and more of that
liking, until it is with me as if I had been born in a house near to
yours, as is the case with my dear Buzz and also that funny Mildred."

"I couldn't like you any better, Bobby, if you had torn the hair off
of my doll's head or broken my slate a dozen times," she laughed at me
again as we slid together the last slide in the dance. "Now come over
and be introduced to Mrs. Taylor. You have only a few minutes, for you
and Buzz must both be back at the Capitol at two. I feel in honor
bound