" muttered the young man aloud, as he again threw down the
book, this time without marking his place; "if I weren't so supremely
comfortable here, I'd get myself into my clothes again and go out to
fight the night for a while. That would be the right thing to do, but
I'm too self-indulgent to do it. Wonder if Barbara Verne ever shirked a
duty for the sake of comfort?"

Thus he began again to think of the girl.

"She's a new type to me," he thought, as he gazed into the fire. "She
seems almost a child, and yet altogether a woman. Wonder what her life
has been. I fancy she felt, when she came in to thank me, like a child
who has been naughty and is required to make a proper apology. There was
certainly a suggestion of that sort of thing in her manner, just at
first. Then the strong woman in her mastered the child, and she carried
out her determination resolutely. It is very charming, that combination
of shy child-likeness, with the self-control of a strong woman."

At this point Guilford Duncan impatiently kicked over his footrest, rose
to his feet and began dressing for the out of doors. "What an idiot I
am!" he thought. "Here I am presuming to analyze the moods and motives
of a young woman of whose life and character I know nothing whatever,
and with whom I have exchanged not more than a dozen or twenty sentences
in all my life. You need a drenching in the storm, Guilford Duncan, and
you shall have it, in the interest of your sanity."

Donning his boots and overcoat, and pulling his slouch hat well down
over his eyes and ears, the young man strode out into the storm.

When he came back at midnight, drenched and chilled, his fire had burned
itself out. After he had rubbed his damp skin into a healthful glow, he
extinguished the lamp and crawled into bed.

In spite of all, however, Guilford Duncan was still thinking of Barbara
Verne, when, at last, he sank to sleep. His final thought of her took
the form of a resolution:

"I will call upon her, and become really acquainted with her. That will
cure me of this strange and utterly absurd fascination. Of course the
girl must be commonplace in the main, and when I come to realize that,
the glamour will fade away."

XIV

A SOCIAL ADVANCE

Guilford Duncan carried out his purpose, as he thought, with a good deal
of tact. He began by calling, not upon Barbara, but upon three or four
other young women--a thing he had never done before. He thought in this
way to