lured by the false pretence
that one of her girl friends is ill, she is enticed into a mysterious
house of a sinister elegance, and apparently irretrievably compromised.
The westerner follows, forces his way through the portals, engages the
villain, and vanquishes him. Leila becomes a Bride. We behold her, at the
end, mistress of one of those magnificent stone mansions with grilled
vestibules and negro butlers into whose sacred precincts we are
occasionally, in the movies, somewhat breathlessly ushered--a long way
from Hawtrey's restaurant and a hall-bedroom. A long way, too, from the
Bagatelle and Fillmore Street--but to Lise a way not impossible, nor even
improbable.

This work of art, conveying the moral that virtue is an economic asset,
made a great impression on Lise. Good Old Testament doctrine, set forth
in the Book of Job itself. And Leila, pictured as holding out for a
higher price and getting it, encouraged Lise to hold out also. Mr. Wiley,
in whose company she had seen this play, and whose likeness filled the
plush and silver-plated frame on her bureau, remained ironically ignorant
of the fact that he had paid out his money to make definite an ambition,
an ideal hitherto nebulous in the mind of the lady whom he adored. Nor
did Lise enlighten him, being gifted with a certain inscrutableness. As a
matter of fact it had never been her intention to accept him, but now
that she was able concretely to visualize her Lochinvar of the future,
Mr. Whey's lack of qualifications became the more apparent. In the first
place, he had been born in Lowell and had never been west of Worcester;
in the second, his salary was sixteen dollars a week: it is true she had
once fancied the Scottish terrier style of hair-cut abruptly ending in
the rounded line of the shaven neck, but Lochinvar had been
close-cropped. Mr. Wiley, close-cropped, would have resembled a convict.

Mr. Wiley was in love, there could be no doubt about that, and if he had
not always meant marriage, he meant it now, having reached a state where
no folly seems preposterous. The manner of their meeting had had just the
adventurous and romantic touch that Lise liked, one of her favourite
amusements in the intervals between "steadies" being to walk up and down
Faber Street of an evening after supper, arm in arm with two or three
other young ladies, all chewing gum, wheeling into store windows and
wheeling out again, pretending the utmost indifference to melting gla