"Collins, can you follow this line? I think we drove out this way the day the car came?"
"Oh, yes, sir—thank you," the man declared, slipping his way in and out among the throngs of other vehicles.
Then as we whirled away down the pike I kept thinking of this man—this young Englishman, who had come to America and elevated himself into the position of vice-president and general-manager of the Consolidated Traction Company, but, absurdly enough, no thought of the limousine nor the traction company came into my musings. I thought of him as a spirit—a spirit-man, who had lived in the woods. He had dwelt in a hut—or a cave—and toiled with his hands, hewing down trees, burning charcoal, eating brown bread at noon. Then, at dusk, he laid aside his tools, rumbling homeward in a great two-wheeled cart, whistling as he went, but softly—because he was deep in thought.
The seven ages of man are really nothing to be compared in point of interest with the different conditions of mind which women demand of them.
Very young girls seek about—often in vain—for a man who can compel; then later, they demand one who can feel; afterward their own expansion clamors for one who can understand—but the final stage of all is reached when the feminine craving can not be satisfied save by the man who can achieve.
This, of course, indicates that the woman herself is experienced—sometimes even to the point of being a widow—but it is decidedly a satisfying state of mind when it is once reached, because it is permanent.
And your man of achievement is pretty apt to be an uncomplicated human. His deepest "problem" is how to make the voices of the nightingale and alarm clock harmonize. For he is a lover between suns—and a laborer during them.
At Solinski's Japanese tea-room in Union Street, the limousine slowed up. The band was playing The Rosary as we went in, for it was the hour of the afternoon for the professional seers and seen of Oldburgh's medium world to drop in off the sidewalks for half an hour and dawdle over a tutti-frutti. The ultra-sentimental music always gets such people as these—and the high excruciating notes of this love-wail were ringing out with an intense poignancy.
"Each hour a pearl—each pearl a prayer—"
"Which table do you prefer?" my companion asked me, but for a moment I failed to answer. I was looking up at the clock, and I saw that the hands were pointing to six. I had met Maitland Tait at four!—Thus I had two pearls already on my string, I reckoned.