se from their table until nearly three o'clock. Twice
she had asked: "How about the firm?" and twice he had answered
irreverently: "Let them be hanged!" He looked into her eyes wondering
and hoping, but in their clearness read no promise. He tried to lead
their talk round to the one subject which pervaded and appalled him,
but each time that he drove in his wedge of reference she shook her
head at him, smiled and closed her lips, as a woman saying: "You don't
talk me over in this world or the next."

But when he reminded her "It was here, to this very table, that I took
you, on your birthday before last," she joined him in reminiscence.

"And I was miserable, envying every woman I saw, ashamed of my frock
and my hands and my old shoes; ashamed of everything. I knew I
couldn't compete."

"You could compete with any woman in the world." He cast a deprecating
look around them.

"I couldn't then. There was a woman I specially envied, I remember, an
actress whose name you knew. How long ago it seems."

"Only a year and a half," he replied quickly, plunging into a side
issue.

"You admired her," she said curiously, "didn't you?"

He lied: "I don't remember."

"I do," she said. "I used to pray about you--that woman was in my mind
when I prayed, and asked God to make you admire me for the children
I'd borne, and not to let you see how old and ugly I should grow.
Doesn't it seem funny?"

"It's not at all funny," he said, his eyes on the tablecloth. "I'm
sorry you--if you'd told me--talked to me--"

"You'd have thought me more of a whining wife than ever."

"Well, it's over, anyway. Won't you forget it?"

"I'm just delighted to forget it. But there's a kind of joy in
remembering all the same, such as a man feels in thinking of his
starvation early days after he's made himself rich."

"And now I'm to be starved instead?"

Then she collected her muff and gloves, closed her coat, pinning the
violets outside, thanked him for a nice lunch and left him. He paid
the bill in a hurry and hastened after her, catching up with her upon
the kerb.

"Well," he said in her ear, "I shall keep on asking. What do you
think?"

She signalled a passing omnibus to stop and boarding it left him with
a smile and wave of the hand. For a few seconds, he stood on the kerb,
at grips with a feeling of humiliation and defeat, then he began to
walk back to his work. He was not yet accustomed to the setting of
this new act he was playing wi