tter of course."

"Can you give me an hour?" she asked, and he said he could.

It occurred to her, as the moment of his arrival drew near, that she
might better have thought twice before appointing their meeting here in
her apartment. Discretion perhaps would have suggested a more neutral
rendezvous. But she didn't take this consideration very seriously and
with the first real look she got into his face after she had let him in,
she dismissed it utterly. They shook hands and said, "Good morning," and
she asked him to sit down, all as if nothing had happened the night
before. But he wasted no time in getting to the point.

"There's one idea you'll have got, from what I said last night, that's a
mistake and that's got to be set right before we go any further. That
is, that you owe your position here, as my assistant, to the fact that
I'd fallen in love with you. That's not true. In fact, it's the opposite
of the truth. That feeling of mine has worked against you instead of for
you. I'll have to explain that a little to make you understand it. And
if you won't mind I'll have to talk pretty straight." She gave him a nod
of assent, but he did not immediately go on. It was a reflective pause,
not an embarrassed one.

"I've always despised;" he said, "a man who mixed up his love-affairs
with his business. In my business, perhaps, there's a certain temptation
to do that and I've always been on guard against it. I've had
love-affairs, more or less, all along. But in my vacations. You can't do
decent honest work when your mind's on that sort of thing, and I care
more about my work than anything else.

"Well, that night in Chicago, after the opening of _The Girl
Up-stairs_, when I took you out to supper, I didn't know what I wanted.
That's the truth. I'd been fighting my interest in you, my personal
interest that is, calling myself all kinds of an old fool. I'd never had
a thing get me like that before and I didn't know what to make of it.
Well, the business was over, of course. I was entitled to a little
vacation. I suppose, that night, if you'd shown the least sense of how I
felt, even if it was just by seeming frightened, I might have flared up
and made love to you. But you didn't see it at all. You had some sort
of--fence around you that held me off. And for a while you even made me
forget that I was in love with you. Forget that you were anything but
the cleverest person I had known at catching my ideas and putting them