cious of the
time-table part of his mind talking trains at him. He takes his arms
from around Nancy--she sits up rubbing her eyes with the back of her
hand as if to take the dream that was so glittering in them away now she
and Oliver have to talk business-affairs.

"Oh, my _hair_--lucky it's bobbed, that's all--I'd have lost all the
hairpins I ever had in it by now--Well, Ollie--"

Her hand goes over to his uneasily, takes hold. For a moment the dream
comes back and she forgets entirely what she was going to say.

"Oh _dear_!"

"Nancy, Nancy, Nancy!"

But she will be firm about their talking. "No, we mustn't really, we
mustn't, or I can't tell you anything at all. Well, it's this.

"I didn't tell you about it at all--didn't even imagine it would come
to anything. But that old geology specimen Mrs. Winters knows the
art-editor of "The Bazaar" and she happened to say so once when she was
here being gloomy with mother, so I wormed a letter out of her to her
friend about me. And I sent some things in and the poor man seemed to be
interested--at least he said he wanted to see more--and then we started
having a real correspondence. Until finally--it was that Friday because
I wrote you the letter right away--he goes and sends me a letter saying
to come on to New York--that I can have a regular job with them if I
want to, and if they like my stuff well enough, after a couple of months
they'll send me to Paris to do fashions over there and pay me a salary I
can more than live on and everything!"

Nancy cannot help ending with a good deal of triumph, though there is
anxiety behind the triumph as well. But to Oliver it seems as if the
floor had come apart under his feet.

When he has failed so ludicrously and completely, Nancy has succeeded
and succeeded beyond even his own ideas of success. She can go to Paris
and have all they ever planned together, now; it has all bent down to
her like an apple on a swinging bough, all hers to take, from lunch at
Prunier's and sunset over the river to that perfect little apartment
they know every window of by heart--and he is no nearer it than he was
eight months ago. He has felt the pride in her voice and knows it as
most human and justified, but because he is young and unreasonable
that pride of hers hurts his own. And then there is something else. All
through what she was saying it was "I" that said, not "we."

"That's fine, Nancy," he says uncertainly. "That's certainly fine!"