my chain. I guess I'll keep it in my
vest pocket."

"I didn't know you were so superstitious," she mocked.

"Pretty nearly everybody's superstitious," he declared. And she thought
of Lise.

"I'm not. I believe if things are going to happen well, they're going to
happen. Nothing can prevent it."

"By thunder" he exclaimed, struck by her remark. "You are like that
You're different from any person I ever knew...."

From such anecdotes she pieced together her new Ditmar. He spoke of a
large world she had never seen, of New York and Washington and Chicago,
where he intended to take her. In the future he would never travel alone.
And he told her of his having been a delegate to the last National
Republican Convention, explaining what a delegate was. He gloried in her
innocence, and it was pleasant to dazzle her with impressions of his
cosmopolitanism. In this, perhaps, he was not quite so successful as he
imagined, but her eyes shone. She had never even been in a sleeping car!
For her delectation he launched into an enthusiastic description of these
vehicles, of palatial compartment cars, of limited, transcontinental
trains, where one had a stenographer and a barber at one's disposal.

"Neither of them would do me any good," she complained.

"You could go to the manicure," he said.

There had been in Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal
moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high,
festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as
Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a
special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the
company of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers,
collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred, as
the French say, in terms of their "little" names. He dwelt on the
magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an
inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to
"the seeing of Chicago" as would bear repetition. No women belonged to
this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.
Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the
cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities. And
the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified
picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United
States had been chosen. In her in