sunset colors,
glowing in the sky and reflected in the waters of the bay, voiced her
delight in it Gordon's response would be polite but perfunctory. He
would look and make comment, but she knew that it left him cold. If
she wore a flower at her belt or her throat, chosen with utmost care
to make a tender little harmony of color with her waist or her tie or
the faint pink of her cheeks, it nettled her a little that he did not
even seem to see it.

"If I do that at the office when Mr. Brand is there," she said to
herself, "it's the first thing he sees and he always speaks about it
and looks at it with pleasure and he--doesn't care anything about me!"

"I know, it is a defect of my nature," he said one day in response to
a little gentle rallying on her part because of his lack of interest
in an evening panorama of unusual beauty. "I know I lose a great deal
of the pleasure of living because of it, but I can't help it.
Something seems to have been left out of my make-up. But I hope that
some time I shall recover it. You are so sensitive to these things,
perhaps you can teach me how to feel them, too."

Their talk verged soon into the more or less confidential themes of
personal viewpoints, experiences and ambitions. Henrietta noticed that
Gordon said nothing about his past life, about his relatives or
friends or where he had grown up, or gone to school, or what he had
done in his youth. But he was full of hopes and plans for the future.
His brain was busy working out ideas for large industrial schemes that
should prove the possibility of combining reasonable profit for their
creators and managers with ample wages, comfortable homes and
expanding lives for their workers. In his mind projects were taking
form, though vague as yet, for renovating those noisome places of the
city where human nature, undiluted by space, stews corrosion and
corruption for its souls and bodies. Every day he would give her a
glimpse of one or another of a multitude of half formed ideas, perhaps
but just conceived, perhaps taking tentative form, which he was eager
to work out and put to practical test. For the most part they seemed
to her to be an unusual combination of business shrewdness, just
feeling, and altruistic intent. Apparently his aim in them was to
attain the end of social betterment by means of the co-operative and
mutually profitable effort of all concerned in them.

He talked much and with enthusiasm of these things and Henriett