s evening."

Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.

"I wondered, if you were alone--" Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
to him. "I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Mrs. Wayne, "but I can't. I have a boy coming.
He's studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn't
touched a drop for two."

He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
the scene at Adelaide's; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady's
drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.

"I'm afraid I'm detaining you," he said. The visit had been a failure.

"Oh, not at all," she replied, and then added in a tone of more
sincerity: "I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,"
she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, "I was trying
to balance it."

"You should not be troubled with such things," said Mr. Lanley, thinking
how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.

Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother's checks, but of
late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. "I don't see how I
can be," she said, too hopeless to deny it.

"If you would allow me," said Mr. Lanley. "I am an excellent bookkeeper."

"Oh, I shouldn't like to tr