lem as has ever been given a lover to
solve--how, in a city like New York, to meet a girl of whom he knew
absolutely nothing, and who was probably unaware of his own existence.
He might have waited, it is true--chance holds many an odd trick--but he
had decided to be impatient, and in his impatience he went to Gramercy
Park and drank tea there, not once, but four afternoons in succession,
an excess of civility which surprised Mrs. Weldon not a little.

That he should make an early visit of digestion was quite in the order
of things, but when that visit was repeated again and again, Mrs.
Weldon, with a commingling of complacency and alarm, told herself that,
in her quality of married woman, such persistence should be discouraged.
But the opportunity for such discouragement did not present itself, or
rather, when it did the need of discouragement had passed. Tristrem
drank tea with her several times, and then disappeared abruptly. "He
must have known it was hopeless," she reflected, when a week went by
unmarked by further enterprise on his part. And then, the intended
discouragement notwithstanding, she felt vaguely vexed.

In the tea-drinking Tristrem's object, if not apparent to Mrs. Weldon,
was perfectly clear to himself. He desired to learn something of Miss
Raritan, and he knew, if the tea-drinking was continued with sufficient
endurance, not only would he acquire, from a talkative lady like his
hostess, information of the amplest kind, which after all was secondary,
but that in the course of a week the girl herself must put in an
appearance. A dinner call, if not obligatory to him, was obligatory to
her, and on that obligation he counted.

To those who agree to be bound by what the Western press calls
etiquette, there is nothing more inexorable than a social debt. A woman
may contest her mantua-maker's bill with impunity, her antenuptial
promises may go to protest and she remain unestopped; but let her leave
a dinner-call overdue and unpaid, then is she shameless indeed. In this
code Tristrem was necessarily learned. On returning to Fifth Avenue he
had marvelled somewhat at noting that laws which applied to one sex did
not always extend to the other, that civility was not exacted of men,
that politeness was relegated to the tape-counter and out of place in a
drawing-room; in a word, that it was not good form to be courteous, and
not ill-bred to be rude.

While the tea-drinking was in progress he managed without m