There was no hint of the coquette about her. Physical appeal this Ruth had, but it was the allure of sunlight and meadows, of tennis and a boat with bright, canted sails, not of boudoir nor garden dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be "protected," and round whom all her circle of life would center....
So Carl inarticulately mused, with the intentness which one gives to strangers in a quiet car, till he laughed, "I feel as if I knew her like a book." The century's greatest problem was whether he would finally prefer her to Olive, if he knew them. If he could speak to them——But that was, in New York, more difficult than beating a policeman or getting acquainted with the mayor. He would lose them.
Already they were rising, going out.
He couldn't let them be lost. He glanced out of the window, sprang up with an elaborate pretense that he had come to his own street. He followed them out, still conning head-lines in his paper. His grave absorption said, plain that all might behold, that he was a respectable citizen to whom it would never occur to pursue strange young women.
His new friends had been close to him in the illuminated car, but they were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom he was going to call. This was to convince the policeman of the perfect purity of his intentions. The fact that there was no policeman nearer than the man on fixed post a block away did not lessen Carl's pleasure in the make-believe. He industriously inspected the house-numbers as he followed the quickly moving girls, and frequently took out his watch. Nothing should make him late in calling on that dear old friend.
Not since Adam glowered at the intruder Eve has a man been so darkly uninterested in two charmers. He stared clear through them; he looked over their heads; he observed objects on the other side of the street. He indignantly told the imaginary policemen who stopped him that he hadn't even seen the girls till this moment; that he was the victim of a plot.
The block through which the cavalcade was passing was lined with shabby-genteel brownstone houses, with high stoops and haughty dark doors, and dressmakers' placards or doctors' cards in the windows. Carl was puzzled. The girls seemed rather too cheerful to belong in this decayed and gloomy block, which, in the days when horsehair furniture and bankers had mattered, had seemed imposing. But the girls ascended the steps of a house which was typical of the row, except that five motor-cars stood before it. Carl, passing, went up the steps of the next house and rang the bell.
"What a funny place!" he heard one of the girls—he judged that it was Ruth—remark from the neighboring stoop. "It looks exactly like Aunt Emma when she wears an Alexandra bang. Do we go right up? Oughtn't we to ring? It ought to be the craziest party—anarchists——"
"A party, eh?" thought Carl.
"——ought to ring, I suppose, but——Yes, there's sure to be all sorts of strange people at Mrs. Hallet's——" said the voice of the other girl, then the door closed upon both of them.