ng as you seem to use in New York."

"Oh, come now!" he exclaimed, laughingly, and apparently not the least
out of countenance, "you made him think he was the only pebble on the
beach. I have no idea what you were talking about."

"Literature," she said. "Perhaps that was the reason why you couldn't
understand it."

"He may be interested in literature," replied Mr. Spence, "but it
wouldn't be a bad guess to say that he was more interested in stocks and
bonds."

"He doesn't talk about them, at any rate," said Honora.

"I'd respect him more if he did," he announced. "I know those
fellows-they make love to every woman they meet. I saw him eying you at
lunch."

Honora laughed.

"I imagine the Vicomte could make love charmingly," she said.

Mr. Spence suddenly became very solemn.

"Merely as a fellow-countryman, Miss Leffingwell--" he began, when she
sprang to her feet, her eyes dancing, and finished the sentence.

"You would advise me to be on my guard against him, because, although I
look twenty-five and experienced, I am only nineteen and inexperienced.
Thank you."

He paused to light another cigarette before he followed her across the
turf. But she had the incomprehensible feminine satisfaction of knowing,
as they walked homeward, that the usual serenity of his disposition was
slightly ruffled.

A sudden caprice impelled her, in the privacy of her bedroom that
evening, to draw his portrait for Peter Erwin. The complacency of New
York men was most amusing, she wrote, and the amount of slang they used
would have been deemed vulgar in St. Louis. Nevertheless, she liked
people to be sure of themselves, and there was something "insolent" about
New York which appealed to her. Peter, when he read that letter, seemed
to see Mr. Howard Spence in the flesh; or arrayed, rather, in the kind of
cloth alluringly draped in the show-windows of fashionable tailors. For
Honora, all unconsciously, wrote literature. Literature was invented
before phonographs, and will endure after them. Peter could hear Mr.
Spence talk, for a part of that gentleman's conversation--a
characteristic part--was faithfully transcribed. And Peter detected a
strain of admiration running even through the ridicule.

Peter showed that letter to Aunt Mary, whom it troubled, and to Uncle
Tom, who laughed over it. There was also a lifelike portrait of the
Vicomte, followed by the comment that he was charming, but very French;
but the meaning of this las