they didn't think it necessary to assume more formal attitudes for
Percy. They looked up over the smeary pink sheets of paper, and
handed him, as Percy said, the same old jolly:

"Hullo, Perc'! Come to see me, ain't you? So flattered!"

"Any sweet goods on you, Perc'? Anything doing in the bong-bong line
to-night?"

"Look at his new neckwear! Say, Perc', remember me. That tie would
go lovely with my new tailored waist."

"Quit your kiddin', girls!" called Mrs. Brown, who was drying
shirt-waists on the dining-room radiator. "And, Percy, mind the rugs
when you're steppin' round among them gum-drops."

Percy fired his last shot at the recumbent figures, and followed
Stella into the dining-room, where the table and two large
easy-chairs formed, in Mrs. Brown's estimation, a proper background
for a serious suitor.

"I say, Stell'," he began as he walked about the table with his
hands in his pockets, "seems to me we ought to begin buying our
stuff." She brightened perceptibly. "Ah," Percy thought, "so that
_was_ the trouble!" "To-morrow's Saturday; why can't we make an
afternoon of it?" he went on cheerfully. "Shop till we're tired,
then go to Houtin's for dinner, and end up at the theater."

As they bent over the lists she had made of things needed, Percy
glanced at her face. She was very much out of her sisters' class and
out of his, and he kept congratulating himself on his nerve. He was
going in for something much too handsome and expensive and
distinguished for him, he felt, and it took courage to be a plunger.
To begin with, Stella was the sort of girl who had to be well
dressed. She had pale primrose hair, with bluish tones in it, very
soft and fine, so that it lay smooth however she dressed it, and
pale-blue eyes, with blond eyebrows and long, dark lashes. She would
have been a little too remote and languid even for the fastidious
Percy had it not been for her hard, practical mouth, with lips that
always kept their pink even when the rest of her face was pale. Her
employers, who at first might be struck by her indifference,
understood that anybody with that sort of mouth would get through
the work.

After the shopping-lists had been gone over, Percy took up the
question of the honeymoon. Stella said she had been thinking of
Atlantic City. Percy met her with firmness. Whatever happened, he
couldn't leave his books now.

"I want to do my traveling right here on Forty-second Street, with a
high-price show e