ir own house where Hugh had
played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face.

She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of
lenses and time-exposures.

Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but
an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She
could not endure it. She stammered:

"I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't quite sure
where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't room to put you up at
the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don't you
think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?"

He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she
answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington.
But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating
anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about
it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have
been with her blandness he said readily:

"Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about
grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way these taxi shuffers
skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going
up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends--must be fine
women--and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how
he breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?"
He patted her shoulder.

At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to
jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the
girl's story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary
what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked
him--not as the husband of a friend but as a physician--whether there
was "anything to this inoculation for colds."

His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual
slang.

Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the
company.

"He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for confidences.
They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to
agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling
forces, but swept on by them.

He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her
only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes!

She took him to the obviou