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
g