wn and the whole air of the place was beyond even the retailed
splendour of J. Wilkinson. The girl threw back her wraps and began to
order freely. Peter, who had a glimpse of the card, stiffened.

"I--I guess I'm not so very hungry," he cautioned. She looked up from
the menu sharply and her face softened; she made one or two deft changes
in it.

"This is Dutch, you know," she threw out. "Oh, I know you invited me,
but you didn't think I was one of the kind that let a strange gentleman
pay for my dinner, did you?" Peter denied it, stricken with
embarrassment. She seemed in the light, to take him in more completely.

"Say, would you have licked that fellow the other night, honest?"

"Well, if he was disrespectful to a lady----" Peter began.

"Oh, _excuse_ me!" She turned her head aside for a moment in her long
gloves. "You _are_ country!" she said again, but it seemed not to
displease her. "I don't care so much for her voice, do you?" She turned
on the singer. They discussed the entertainment and the dinner. They
were a long time about it. The orchestra played a waltz at last, and
Ethel--she had told him to call her that--put her arms on the table and
leaned across to him, and though Peter knew by this time that her cheeks
were painted, he didn't somehow mind it.

"What's it like up in the country where you lived?" she wished to know.

"Hills mostly, little wooded ones, and high pastures, and the apple
orchards going right up over them...."

"I know," she nodded. "I guess it's them I been smelling ... or
laylocks."

"Things coming up in the garden," Peter contributed: "peonies, and long
rows of daffodils...." He did not realize it, but he had described to
her no place that he had known but the way to the House. The girl cut
him off.

"Don't!" she said sharply. "You know," she half apologized, "you kind of
remind me of somebody ... a boy I knew up country. It was him that got
me here----" She made her little admission quietly, the horror of it
long worn down to daily habit. "That first time I saw you, it seemed
almost as if it was him ... I ain't never blamed him--much. He didn't
mean to be bad, but when the trouble came he couldn't help none.... I
guess real help is about the hardest thing to find there is."

"I guess it is."

"Oh, well, we gotta make the best of it." She glanced at Peter with her
head on one side as she twiddled her fingers across the cloth to the
tune of the orchestra.

They went out at