, to read your daily journals, to write your letters,
and do it incidentally in the open air while some diplomat of a waiter
serves you with food that assuages the palate, without insulting your
mood. That's what I like about the little restaurant in the court
there. It's out-of-doors, and you may stay there without feeling your
table is in requisition for the next man. It's a very polite little
place."

"You didn't expect to get in there to-night."

"I had hopes of it. I've not dined, you see."

"Not dined?" Nancy's eyes widened in dismay.

"There's no use for me to dine unless I can eat my food tranquilly, in
some accustomed corner. Getting nourished with me is a spiritual, as
well as a physical matter. It is with all sensitive people. Don't you
think so?"

"I suppose so. I--I hadn't thought of it that way. Couldn't you eat
something now--an oyster stew, or something like that?"

"Nothing in any way remotely connected with that. An oyster stew is to
me the most barbarous of concoctions. I loathe hot milk,--an oyster is
an adjunct to a fish sauce, or a preface to a good dinner."

"You ought to have something," Nancy urged, "even ice-cream is more
nourishing than mineral water, or coffee with cream in it."

"I like coffee after dinner, not before."

"If you only eat when it's convenient, or the mood takes you," Nancy
cried out in real distress, "how can you ever be sure that you have
calories enough? The requirement of an average man at active labor is
estimated at over three thousand calories. You must have something
like a balanced ration in order to do your work."

"Must I?" Collier Pratt smiled his rare smile. "Well, at any rate, it
is good to hear you say so."

She finished her ice-cream, and Collier Pratt drank his mineral water
slowly, and smoked innumerable cigarettes of Virginia tobacco. The
conversation which had proceeded so expeditiously to this point seemed
for no apparent reason, suddenly to become gratuitous. Nancy had never
before begun on the subject of the balanced ration without being
respectfully allowed to go through to the end. She had not been
allowed to feel snubbed, but she was a little bewildered that any
conversation in which she was participating, could be so gracefully
stopped before it was ended by her expressed desire.

Collier Pratt took his watch out of his pocket, and looked at it
hastily.

"By jove," he said, "I had entirely forgotten. I have a child in my
charge. I mu