"Oh! Oh, how are you?"

"Why, why I'm--I've got settled. I can get into the engineering school

all right."

"I'm glad."

"Uh, enjoying Seattle?"

"Oh! Oh yes. The mountains---- Do you like it?"

"Oh! Oh yes. Sea and all---- Great town."

"Uh, w-when are we going to see you? Daddy had to go East, left you his

regards. W-when----?"

"Why--why I suppose you're awful--awfully busy, meeting people and

all----"

"Yes, I am, rather, but----" Her hedging uncomfortable tone changed to a

cry of distress. "Milt! I must see you. Come up at four this afternoon."

"Yes!"

He rushed to a small, hot tailor-shop. He panted "Press m' suit while I

wait?" They gave him a pair of temporary trousers, an undesirable pair

of trousers belonging to a short fat man with no taste in fabrics, and

with these flapping about his lean legs, he sat behind a calico curtain,

reading The War Cry and looking at a "fashion-plate" depicting nine

gentlemen yachtsmen each nine feet tall, while the Jugoslav in charge

unfeelingly sprinkled and ironed and patted his suit.

He spent ten minutes in blacking his shoes, in his room--and twenty

minutes in getting the blacking off his fingers.

He was walking through the gate in the Gilson hedge at one minute to

four.

But he had reached Queen Anne Hill at three. For an hour he had walked

the crest road, staring at the steamers below, alternately gripping his

hands with desire of Claire, and timorously finally deciding that he

wouldn't go to her house--wouldn't ever see her again.

He came into the hall tremblingly expecting some great thing, some

rending scene, and she met him with a cool, "Oh, this is nice. Eva had

some little white cakes made for us." He felt like a man who has asked

for a drink of cold charged water and found it warm and flat.

"How---- Dandy house," he muttered, limply shaking her limp hand.

"Yes, isn't it a darling. They do themselves awfully well here. I'm

afraid your bluff, plain, democratic Westerners are a fraud. I hear a

lot more about 'society' here than I ever did in the East. The sets seem

frightfully complicated." She was drifting into the drawing-room, to a

tapestry stool, and Milt was awkwardly stalking a large wing chair,

while she fidgeted: "Everybody tells me about how one poor dear soul, a charming lady who

used to take in washing or salt gold-mines or something, and she came

here a little while ago with billions and billions of dollars, and tried

to buy her way in by shopping for all the charities in town, and

apparently she's just as out of it here as she would be in London. You

and I aren't exclusive like that, are we!"

Somehow---Her "you and I" was too kindly, as though she was trying to put him at

ease, as though she knew he couldn't possibly be at ease. With a

horribly elaborate politeness, with a smile that felt hot on his

twitching cheeks, he murmured, "Oh no. No, we---- No, I guess----"




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