not see the relation of these cold abstractions to the pleasure of sitting
there with a pretty girl in that way. But he said nothing.

"Do you know," she went on, turning her face prettily around toward him,
but holding it a little way off, to secure attention as impersonal as might
be under the circumstances, "what pleased me more than anything else you
ever said to me?"

"No," answered Bartley. "Something you got out of me when you were trying
to make me tell you the difference between you and the other Equity girls?"

She laughed, in glad defiance of her own consciousness. "Well, I _was_
trying to make you compliment me; I'm not going to deny it. But I must say
I got my come-uppance: you didn't say a thing I cared for. But you did
afterward. Don't you remember?"

"No. When?"

She hesitated a moment. "When you told me that my influence had--had--made
you better, you know--"

"Oh!" said Bartley. "That! Well," he added, carelessly, "it's every word
true. Didn't you believe it?"

"I was just as glad as if I did; and it made me resolve never to do or say
a thing that could lower your opinion of me; and then, you know, there at
the door--it all seemed part of our trying to make each other better. But
when father looked at me in that way, and asked me if we were engaged, I
went down into the dust with shame. And it seemed to me that you had just
been laughing at me, and amusing yourself with me, and I was so furious I