She withdrew her arms and shoved him away, only to receive him
forgivingly half a dozen seconds afterward.

"Come on, the four of us," Bert went on irrepressibly. "The
night's young. Let's make a time of it--Pabst's Cafe first, and
then some. What you say, Bill? What you say, Saxon? Mary's game."

Saxon waited and wondered, half sick with apprehension of this
man beside her whom she had known so short a time.

"Nope," he said slowly. "I gotta get up to a hard day's work
to-morrow, and I guess the girls has got to, too."

Saxon forgave him his tone-deafness. Here was the kind of man she
always had known existed. It was for some such man that she had
waited. She was twenty-two, and her first marriage offer had come
when she was sixteen. The last had occurred only the month
before, from the foreman of the washing-room, and he had been
good and kind, but not young. But this one beside her--he was
strong and kind and good, and YOUNG. She was too young herself
not to desire youth. There would have been rest from fancy starch
with the foreman, but there would have been no warmth. But this
man beside her. . . . She caught herself on the verge involuntarily
of pressing his hand that held hers.

"No, Bert, don't tease he's right," Mary was saying. "We've got
to get some sleep. It's fancy starch to-morrow, and all day on
our feet."

It came to Saxon with a chill pang that she was surely older than