CHAPTER VI

THE BIG HORSE


"It's too ridiculous," she said. "Since last night, when I got to
thinking how I must have looked, wrestling with that conductor, I've
been telling myself that if I ever saw you again, I'd try to act like a
lady. But it's no use, is it?"

He said that he, too, had hoped to make a better impression the second
time than the first. That was what he brought the books back for. He had
hoped to convince her that a man capable of consigning a half-drowned
girl to a ten-mile ride on the elevated, instead of walking her over to
his sister's, having her dried out properly, and sent home in a motor,
wasn't permanently and chronically as blithering an idiot as he may have
seemed. It was a great load off of his mind to find her alive at all.

She gave him a humorously exaggerated account of the prophylactic
measures her mother had submitted her to the night before, and she
concluded:

"I'm awfully sorry mother's not at home--mother and my sister Portia.
They'd both like to thank you for--looking after me last night. Because
really, you did, you know."

"There never was anything less altruistic in the world," he assured her.