place. Certainly Anita Flagg could not take her place. Not
because she was rich, not because she had jeered at him and
made him a laughing-stock, not because his admiration--and he
blushed when he remembered how openly, how ingenuously he had
shown it to her--meant nothing; but because the girl he
thought she was, the girl he had made dreams about and wanted
to marry without a moment's notice, would have seen that what
he offered, ridiculous as it was when offered to Anita Flagg,
was not ridiculous when offered sincerely to a tired, nerve-
worn, overworked nurse in a hospital. It was because Anita
Flagg had not seen that that she could not now make up to him
for the girl he had lost, even though she herself had
inspired that girl and for a day given her existence.

Had he known it, the Anita Flagg of his imagining was just as
unlike and as unfair to the real girl as it was possible for
two people to be. His Anita Flagg he had created out of the
things he had read of her in impertinent Sunday supplements
and from the impression he had been given of her by the
little ass, Holworthy. She was not at all like that. Ever
since she had come of age she had been beset by sycophants
and flatterers, both old and young, both men and girls, and
by men who wanted her money and by men who wanted her. And it
was because she got the motives of the latter two confused
that she was so often hurt and said sharp, bitter things that
made her appear hard and heartless.

As a matter of fact, in approaching her in the belief that he
was addressing an entirely different person, Sam had got
nearer to the real Anita Flagg than had any other man. And