o the
point of calling him original.

"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the
same folded paper. We're like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can't
you and I strike out for ourselves, May?"

He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and
her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.

"Mercy--shall we elope?" she laughed.

"If you would--"

"You DO love me, Newland! I'm so happy."

"But then--why not be happier?"

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"

"Why not--why not--why not?"

She looked a little bored by his insistence. She knew very well that
they couldn't, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason.
"I'm not clever enough to argue with you. But that kind of thing is
rather--vulgar, isn't it?" she suggested, relieved to have hit on a
word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.

"Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?"

She was evidently staggered by this. "Of course I should hate it--so
would you," she rejoined, a trifle irritably.

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; and
feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the
discussion, she went on light-heartedly: "Oh, did I tell you that I
showed Ellen my ring? She thinks it the most beautiful setting she
ever saw. There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said. I
do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!"

The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in
his study, Janey wandered in on him. He had failed to stop at his club
on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the
law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his
class. He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a
haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour
besieged his brain.

"Sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head
like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures
lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at
the club at that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only what
they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take
in the discussion. The Duke of course would be their principal theme;
though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a
small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black cobs (for wh