River! She was at Pekin in the Boxer
Rebellion! She's roped steers in Oklahoma! She's matched her
embroidery silks to all the sunrise tints on the Himalayas! Just why
in creation should she seem meek--do you suppose--to a--to
a--twenty-five-dollar-a-week clerk like yourself?"

"'A twenty-five-dollar-a-week clerk like myself?'" the Younger Man
fairly gasped. "Why--why--I'm the junior partner of the firm of Barton
& Barton, stock-brokers! Why, we're the biggest--"

"Is that so?" quizzed the Older Man with feigned surprise.
"Well--well--well! I beg your pardon. But now doesn't it all go to
prove just exactly what I said in the beginning--that it doesn't
behoove a single one of us to judge too hastily by appearances?"

As if fairly overwhelmed with embarrassment he sat staring silently
off into space for several seconds. Then--"Speaking of this Miss
Edgarton," he resumed genially, "have you ever exactly sought her
out--as it were--and actually tried to get acquainted with her?"

"No," said Barton shortly. "Why, the girl must be thirty years old!"

"S--o?" mused the Older Man. "Just about your age?"

"I'm thirty-two," growled the Younger Man.

"I'm sixty-two, thank God!" acknowledged the Older Man. "And your
gorgeous Miss Von Eaton--who bores you so--all of a sudden--is
about--?"

"Twenty," prompted the Younger Man.

"Poor--senile--babe," ruminated the Older Man soberly.

"Eh?" gasped the Younger Man, edging forward in his chair. "Eh?
'Senile'? Twenty?"

"Sure!" grinned the Older Man. "Twenty is nothing but the 'sere and
yellow leaf' of infantile caprice! But thirty is the jocund youth of
character! On land or sea the Lord Almighty never made anything as
radiantly, divinely young as--thirty! Oh, but thirty's the darling age
in a woman!" he added with sudden exultant positiveness. "Thirty's the
birth of individuality! Thirty's the--"

"Twenty has got quite enough individuality for me, thank you!"
asserted Barton with some curtness.

"But it hasn't!" cried the Older Man hotly. "You've just confessed
that it hasn't!" In an amazing impulse of protest he reached out and
shook his freckled fist right under the Younger Man's nose. "Twenty, I
tell you, hasn't got any individuality at all!" he persisted
vehemently.

"Twenty isn't anything at all except the threadbare cloak of her
father's idiosyncrasies, lined with her mother's made-over tact,
trimmed with her great-aunt somebody's short-lipped smile, shrouding a
b