to learn not to care about being
considered a failure by all the men of my own age who are passing me by;
and I don't mind confessing to you that that is not always easy--though
you mustn't tell Dr. Melton I'm so weak. I have to train myself to see
that they are not really getting _up_ so fast, but only _scrambling_
fast over slipping, sliding stones; and then I have to try to find some
firm ground where I can make a path of my own, up which I can plod in my
own way."

The tone of the young people, as they talked with their innocent
grandiloquence of these high matters, might have been taken for that of
a couple deep in some intimate discussion, so honestly serious and moved
was it. There was a silence now, also like the pause in a profoundly
personal talk, in which they looked long into each other's eyes.

The clock struck five. Lydia sprang to her feet. "Oh, I must hurry on!
I told Marietta to telephone home that I'd be there at six."

She still preserved her charming unconsciousness of the
unconventionality of her situation. A European girl, brought up in the
strictest ignorance of the world, would still have had intuitions to
make her either painfully embarrassed or secretly delighted with this
impromptu visit to a young bachelor; but Lydia, who had been allowed to
read "everything" and the only compromise to whose youth had been fitful
attempts of the family to remember "not to talk too much about things
before Lydia," was clad in that unearthly innocence which the advancing
tide of sophistication has still left in some parts of the United
States--that sweet, proud, pathetic conviction of the American girl that
evil is not a vital force in any world that she knows. The young man
before her smiled at her in as artless an unconsciousness as her own.
They might have been a pair of children.

"You've plenty of time," he assured her. "Though I live so far out of
the world, the Garfield Avenue trolley line is only five minutes' walk
away. Oh, I'm prosaic and commonplace, with my oil-stove and trolley
cars. There's nothing of the romantic reactionary about me, I'm afraid."
He wrapped the rain-coat about her and took an umbrella.

"Don't you lock up your house when you go away?" asked Lydia.

"The poor man laughs in the presence of thieves," quoted Rankin.

They stood on the veranda now, looking out into the blue twilight. The
rain drummed noisily on the roof and the soft swish of its descent into
the grass rose to