ends of the teeter-totter, you won't
see the picture true."

"Sometimes you show a most surprising poise," he granted her. "But of
course you are not the stuff of which creative artists are made."

She chuckled, and patted her bag where the bill fold lay, with its crisp
hundreds due to some imitation of creative impulse.

"Just where, and in what, am I lacking?" she asked, most humbly.

"A creative artist would not care a fig for truth. He creates an
impression of truth out of a lie if necessary."

"But I am in the direct line from Ananias," she protested. "I inherit
creative talent of that brand."

So they laughed and chattered, in the first real companionship they had
ever known.

True to the plan, they ascended the stage at Eighteenth Street, Bambi in
a flutter of happiness. As the panorama of that most fascinating highway
unrolled before them, she constantly touched this and that and the other
object with the wand of her vivid imagination. Jarvis watched her with
amused astonishment, for the first time really thoroughly aware of her.
Again he noticed that wherever she was she was a lodestone for all eyes.
He decided that it was not beauty, in the strictest sense of the word,
but a sort of radiance which emanated from her like an aura.

Twenty-third Street cut across their path with its teeming throngs.
Madison Square lay smiling in the sunshine like a happy courtesan, with
no hint of its real use as Wayside Inn for all the old, the poor, the
derelict, whose tired feet could find refuge there. The vista of the
avenue lay ahead.

"It's like a necklace of sparkling pearls," Bambi said, with incessant
craning of her neck. "I feel like standing up and singing 'The Song of
the Bazaars.' There isn't a stuff, nor a silk, nor a gem from Araby to
Samarkand that isn't here."

"It bewitches you, doesn't it?" Jarvis commented.

"Think of the wonder of it! Camel trains, and caravans, merchant ships
on all the seas, trains, and electric trucks, all bringing the booty of
the world to this great, shining bazaar for you and me. It's thrilling."

"So it is," he agreed. "I hope you mark the proportion of shops for
men--dresses, hats, jewels, furs, motor clothes, tea rooms, candy shops,
corsetieres, florists, bootmakers, all for women. Motor cars are full of
women. Are there no men in this menagerie?"

"No. They are all cliff-dwellers downtown. They probably wear loin
cloths of a fashionable cut," she laughed back at him