she had stepped aside from, not into,
the real current of her life. Dazzling indeed were some of the
dining-places to which the experienced Willings took their guest, but
somehow none of them seemed so really interesting, after all, as home.
What was happening away off there on Washington Street? Suppose Mr.
Canning should return ahead of time for his farewell visit--return and
find her not there?...

"You're changed somehow, Cally," cried Florrie Willing, on the third or
fourth day--"I can't just put my little patty on it, but I can see it
all the same."

They had just rushed up from breakfast, which the Willings took in the
apartment cafe, and were now dressing furiously to go shopping. Cally,
surprised with her mouth full of hatpins, said of course she had; she
was getting frightfully old.

"You never used to rest a cheek on a pensive hand, and stare five
minutes at a time into eternity. Out with it!" said Florrie. "You're
disappointed in love."

"That's it, too. I loved a tall pretty soldier, and he rode away."

"_We'll_ never ride away, at this rate. Get a _move_ on, Cally! We've
slews and slews of places to go to."

Cally, who considered that she already had a move on, did her best to
get on another one.

Young Mrs. Willing added: "Whatever became of the gay young thing with
the eyelashes you flirted so outrageously with, the time we were up at
Island Inn? What was his name--oh--Mr. Dalhousie?"

Carlisle winced a little in spite of herself.... Banquo could not have
been more impossible to forget than this.

"Oh--why, he and I had the worst kind of smash-up--and he went away
somewhere. I never like to think of him any more.... Let's fly!"

Fly they did, that morning and many others. It was all very different
from life at home. Born and bred in a town where social life is large,
constant, and gay, Carlisle could not help being struck by the fact that
the Willings, roughly speaking, had no friends. One other young couple
in the same hotel, the Jennisons, appeared to be about the limit of
their intimate circle: a phenomenon, no doubt at least partly explained
by the fact that the Willings moved every year, or sometimes twice a
year, "to get a change." Thus, in the huge rabbit-warren, they were
constantly cutting themselves off from their past.

"I can't endure to poke about in the same little spot year after year,"
said Florrie Willing. "If I don't have something new, I simply froth at
the mouth and die.