rm before I dreamed--"

She shuddered and turned back into the room, frowning and counting her
slow steps across the floor.

"After all," she said, "their silliness may be their greatest
mystery--but I don't include Captain Selwyn," she added loyally; "he is
far too intelligent to be like other men."

* * * * *

Yet, like other men, at that very moment Captain Selwyn was playing the
fizzing contents of a siphon upon the iced ingredients of a tall, thin
glass which stood on a table in the Lenox Club.

The governor's room being deserted except by himself and Mr. Lansing, he
continued the animated explanation of his delay in arriving.

"So I stayed," he said to Boots with an enthusiasm quite boyish, "and I
had a perfectly bully time. She's just as clever as she can
be--startling at moments. I never half appreciated her--she formerly
appealed to me in a different way--a young girl knocking at the door of
the world, and no mother or father to open for her and show her the
gimcracks and the freaks and the side-shows. Do you know, Boots, that
some day that girl is going to marry somebody, and it worries me,
knowing men as I do--unless you should think of--"

"Great James!" faltered Mr. Lansing, "are you turning into a schatschen?
Are you planning to waddle through the world making matches for your
friends? If you are I'm quitting you right here."

"It's only because you are the decentest man I happen to know," said
Selwyn resentfully. "Probably she'd turn you down, anyway. But--" and he
brightened up, "I dare say she'll choose the best to be had; it's a pity
though--"

"What's a pity?"

"That a charming, intellectual, sensitive, innocent girl like that
should be turned over to a plain lump of a man."

"When you've finished your eulogy on our sex," said Lansing, "I'll walk
home with you."

"Come on, then; I can talk while I walk; did you think I couldn't?"

And as they struck through the first cross street toward Lexington
Avenue: "It's a privilege for a fellow to know that sort of a girl--so
many surprises in her--the charmingly unexpected and unsuspected!--the
pretty flashes of wit, the naive egotism which is as amusing as it is
harmless. . . . I had no idea how complex she is. . . . If you think you
have the simple feminine on your hands--forget it, Boots!--for she's as
evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight.
. . . And here I've been doing the be