A full month slipped away after the little excursion down the river before Dick saw Lena Quincy again. In fact he had almost forgotten her. That day, if it was recalled at all, was chiefly memorable because it marked a change in his attitude toward his chosen occupation. It seemed that revelation after revelation poured upon him. The intricate threads of city politics fascinated him more and more as he began to understand whence they led and whither.

But one day on the street Dick met and passed Lena. She gave him a little bow—wistful, it seemed to him, and she looked tired and thin. His conscience smote him. He had really meant to do a common kindly thing to cheer this girl, but it had slipped his mind. That night he hunted up her address in his note-book and found his way to the dismal lodging-house.

Four cheap-looking young persons were loitering in the parlor, two were drumming on a piano that was out of tune, and the room smelled fusty. The assembled group giggled and disappeared upon his entrance, and Lena, when she came down the stairs, flushing with embarrassment and pleasure, looked as much out of place as he felt. He stood before her, hat in hand. It would be impossible to talk to her in such a room.

“Miss Quincy,” he said, “it is such a perfect night that it is neither more nor less than self-torture to stay indoors. Can’t you be a bit unconventional and go out with me to the band concert in the park?” He remembered that she went about with the oaf.

Lena hesitated. She realized that this call was a crucial affair to her, though his long delay in coming proved it to be a casual matter to Mr. Percival. She must make no mistake. In her instant’s hesitation, while her soft eyes were looking inquiringly into his face, she had an inspiration.

“I should love it, Mr. Percival,” she said with that little air of reserve that set her apart. “But don’t you see, I—I—can’t go with you—until—until you know my mother and unless she approves.”

“Of course,” said Dick, quite unconscious of Lena’s play-acting.

Lena turned and twisted a bit of worn blue plush trimming on the shelf over the gas-log before she showed him a blushing face.

“The only thing I can do is to ask you to come up stairs and meet mother. She can hardly move about enough to come down.”

She led the way with anxiety in her heart as to how her mother would behave. Would she show irritable astonishment if Lena treated her with gentle deference, and asked her permission to be out in the evening with a strange young man? But Mrs. Quincy knew a thing or two as well as her daughter, and Dick saw only that the room was very ugly, that Lena moved about with lips compressed and voice gentle and full of tender consideration, to make her mother as comfortable as possible before she went away.

“And I shan’t keep you up late, mother, dear,” Lena said with a final kiss that made Mrs. Quincy wink to keep back the statement that she saw herself waiting for the return of her daughter.

The fresh evening air was delicious after this. Dick felt all his chivalry again stirred. It made no difference that Lena said little to keep up her share in the conversation. Dick was content to do the entertaining himself, and satisfied when Lena laughed. He bubbled over with fancies old and new, and even the old ones took fresh life. The college stories and jokes that everybody knew, the commonplaces of his world, set Lena exclaiming with delight. The excitement of the night, and they two alone in the crowd, made the little girl cling to his arm for fear they might be separated! There were quieter moments when they wandered to the outskirts and found a bench for a moment’s rest.

Once he spoke of some of the rough sides of her work, and she answered quietly that she was used to such things and managed to forget their hardship. Dick glanced at her face, self-contained in the gas-light. He remembered her mother and the ugly room. He had a vision of a sweet spirit bearing an adverse fate with dignity, and now giving him, in return for his small act of courtesy, the perfume of her presence, her beauty, her wondering admiration. For the time it seemed to Lena herself that she was what he fancied her. She was only showing him, she thought, the best side of herself. It was natural that she should hide the other.

The clock in the steeple far above tinkled out ten, and Lena drew herself to attention.

“Oh, not yet,” Dick exclaimed. “Let’s go somewhere and get an ice.”

Again Lena hesitated. Even so small a luxury tempted her for its own sake, and she liked to be with Mr. Percival. With Jim Nolan she would have gone in a moment, but she was determined that this man should not think her too easy of access.

“I think not,” she said reluctantly. “I must go home to mother. She isn’t used to being up late, and she needs my help.”

She knew that she had answered well when he urged:

“Very well, then. If you will give such very little nibbles of your time, you must give me more of them. Will you come out again—to the theater—off in the motor—anywhere?”

Lena could hardly speak, but she smiled up her thanks.

“Oh, Mr. Percival!” she said.

As he walked away after seeing her home, he felt himself irritated with the other women, the women to whom ease and pleasure are a matter of course.

So they fell into the way of making little expeditions together, and Dick no longer joked with Ellery about this delectable morsel of pinkness, but kept his growing intimacy to himself. This dell by the way, into which he had strayed by accident, was becoming more fascinating than the crammed highway with its buzzing life.

July and August and September passed and, in spite of her reserve, Dick felt that he was coming to know little Lena well. He had told her all about himself, his mother, his three-cornered intimacy with Norris and Madeline, his plans for his own future, and to all she listened, sometimes with a dreamy far-off look in the big eyes, sometimes with a swift smile of sympathy, in spite of the fact that he and his point of view were often puzzling to her. And he brought dainties and flowers to the dingy room.

Lena, on her side, thoroughly enjoyed some phases of her acquaintance with Mr. Percival. Apart from all other considerations, it was a real pleasure to prove herself the actress she knew she was. She pretended, when she was with him, that she was a wholly different kind of person. It was fun to do it well and convincingly and deliberately. It was exhilarating.

But deeper, far deeper than her histrionic satisfaction lay the hope that Dick Percival might be the key to some other kind of life than that she led; and as the months went by, this hidden intimacy, delicious to him because of its very remoteness, began to irritate her. Was he ashamed of her? Was he playing with her? Privately she found Prince Charming, unless he meant something more than a half-hour now and again, something of a bore. Of what pleasure could it be to her that he was rich and happy and full of plans and in touch with all that was delightful, if he gave none of this to her?

One evening she seemed listless as she sat enduring an account of a garden party he had been to the day before. He had thought it might amuse her, but it evidently didn’t.

“I’m always telling you of my affairs,” he said half querulously. “Why don’t you give me your experiences?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said dully. “You’ve had so many interesting things happen, and you expect ever so many more lovely things to come, but I’ve always been pinched, and I shall have to keep on pinching for ever, I guess.”

“Nonsense!” Dick answered impulsively. “The future is sure to bring you better things.”

She looked down a moment, and Dick had an impression that she was holding back tears. At any rate, when she lifted her head again, her face wore a cold little stare that he had never seen before, and that seemed to hold him at arm’s length.

“I’m quite alone with the people I have to live among,” she said. “I’m not like them, and I don’t care for them.”

“Am I one of your kind?” Dick asked. He reviled himself the next moment for having said so much, but Lena seemed to draw no inferences, though her color heightened a little as she answered:

“Oh, you! There’s only one of you, unfortunately. You are a little oasis in my desert. I’m very grateful for you, but—”

Lena had said such things before. Dick began to revolve plans for a larger kindness, and, in his slow masculine intellect, fancied that it was all his own idea to try and bring this small person into contact with those who would appreciate her and with whom she could be happy,—for of course Lena herself was quite submissive to her lot.

To Dick’s friends this long summer dawdled itself away much as the previous one had done. There were the same week-ends at the lake, with Dick more full of vivacity than ever, Ellery growing more certain of himself, Madeline rounding slowly out of girlhood into womanhood. Yet there was a difference. Half a dozen Sundays, when Percival was too busy, Ellery, half-irritated with his friend, half-exultant in his desertion, spent the quiet afternoons À deux with Madeline.

It seemed to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over Dick. At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling Dick of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code of honor as he saw more and more of the crooked ways of men. Once Norris met him walking with one of the cheaper aldermen, and he wore a duplicate—in gilt—of the alderman’s walk and swagger. He talked politics and reform, but with less emphasis on his ideals and more on the game, which seemed to mean the fun of catching the rascals red-handed and turning them out.

Madeline, as Ellery studied her, was unaware of any change either in Dick himself or in his attitude toward her. It was like her to be above suspicions or small jealousies.

So summer slipped into October, and there came a month of lovely days. Winter, after a feint, slunk into hiding again, and the only result of his excursion was a more splendid red on the maples, a more glowing russet on the oaks. Indian summer reigned in his stead, flinging broadcast her gorgeous colors and her melting mellowness. That men might not surfeit of her sweets, she tempered her daytime prodigality of heat by nights of frost. People were coming back to town, a few, very few, in velvet gowns, but mostly in rags and anxious about their autumn wardrobes; and yet these were days to make one long, as one does in spring, for the smell of the good brown earth and the sniff of untainted country air. The atmosphere was full of glowing warmth that penetrated to the heart and made every face on the street reflect some of its delight; for autumn with her thousand charms and witcheries was proving that she died, not from gray old age, but in the fullness of her prime.

Madeline Elton, therefore, wished herself back again with the fallen maple leaves and the pines that held their own; and Mrs. Lenox was fitting temptation to desire as the two hobnobbed over cups of tea in easy friendliness. When Dick Percival appeared, Mrs. Lenox saw the way to make her bait irresistible.

“Dick,” she cried, “just the man! Don’t you pine for sunshine in your nostrils instead of city smoke? Doesn’t the thought of winter coming, cold and long, make you appreciate these last heavenly gleams? Do you remember what a delicious week you and Mr. Norris and Madeline spent with me a year ago?”

“Yes, to everything,” said Dick. “All of which means—what? No cream, please, Madeline.”

“All of which means,” answered the lady, “that Mr. Lenox and I are wise in our generation and do not fly to the city when the first birds go south; that I want Madeline to come and pay me a visit; that, as a kind of sugar-plum, a chromo, if you please, to induce her to buy my wares, I propose that you and Mr. Norris should join us on the Sunday of next week. What do you say?”

“May the Lord prosper you, and I’ll do my part as an attraction,” Dick replied heartily. “But I choose to be a sugar-plum rather than a chromo, especially if Madeline is going to eat me.”

“I didn’t need any additional inducement, Mrs. Lenox,” said Madeline. “Yourselves and all out-doors are surely sufficient. It will be good to get away from the grime. Now what bee have you in your bonnet, Dick?” For a new look had come into his face as she spoke.

Percival had been glancing around the cheerful comfortable room whose very books and pictures suggested peace of mind. It seemed to him that he looked with Lena’s longing eyes rather than with his own, familiar with these surroundings. He was thinking how little his small courtesies counted, and how much these women could do if they chose. Why shouldn’t he be bold? Madeline and Mrs. Lenox were simple-hearted enough to take his plea at its true value, and not misunderstand his motives. They would be interested in Lena in exactly the same way he was. He smiled at Madeline’s serenely inquiring face.

“Well, Dick?” she asked again.

“I was wondering whether I dared to suggest a little act of human kindliness to you two. You women are so much more ready to do such things than men are, but we are more apt to run up against the cases where it is needed. There’s a pathetic little girl doing some hack work for the Star. Norris knows her. She’s just one of those delicate creatures that ought to live in the sheltered corner of a garden, and she’s out on a bleak prairie. She’s about as much like the people she has to associate with as an old-fashioned single rose is like a cabbage. Even her mother, who is the only relative she has, is nothing but a fretful porcupine of a woman. I’ve been to see them a few times and the situation seems to me almost intolerable. If ever a girl needed a friend or two, it’s she—not for charity, you understand, but just for real contact with people of her own kind. Now a man’s not much use in such circumstances, is he? But naturally I think you are about the best kind of a friend in the world, so I came up this afternoon partly to see if you wouldn’t give her a hand.”

“It sounds as though it might be more of a pleasure than a painful duty.”

“So it would. You’d take to her, I know,” the young man went on eagerly. Mrs. Lenox watched him in somewhat irritated amusement. “She hasn’t your brains, of course, Madeline, but she has such charm, such simplicity and freshness, that you can’t help liking her. And she grubs away at perfectly uncongenial work, and lives with this fusty old mother in a fusty little lodging-house. It makes me sick to think of such daily crucifixion. I’ve no business to say it, I know; but when you spoke about a week at the lake, I couldn’t help thinking what such a thing would mean to her. She’d think herself in Paradise.”

“I suppose, Dick, that this is your adroit and tactful way of suggesting that I should ask her,” Mrs. Lenox said, laughing.

And Madeline, who, if Dick had proposed that Mrs. Lenox should turn her very charming summer home into an orphan asylum, would have considered that the proposition, as coming from him, was entitled to consideration, put in:

“I think it would be a lovely thing to do, Vera.”

“And we should probably let ourselves in for a frightful bore.”

“And you might entertain an angel unawares,” said Dick.

Mrs. Lenox knit her brows and meditated. She didn’t quite like Dick’s championship of this unknown girl, nor did she trust to his judgment; but, like a wise woman, she wanted to know what was the thing that had attracted him, and was big enough in heart to be willing to do a good turn wherever she could.

“This is the oracle of the Pythia,” she said at last. “We will not commit ourselves to anything at the behest of Richard Percival. On my way to the station, now, in fact, Madeline and I will go to see this rose among cabbages. We will introduce ourselves as your friends, Dick. If we think you are a mere deluded male thing, there the matter ends. If we, too, are carried away by enthusiasm, we will invite her on the spur of the moment, and Mr. Lenox, who, like most married men, is a connoisseur in pretty girls, can talk to her. Will this suit you, Dick?”

“Excellently,” said Dick, “I know the result.”

“Then you’ll come next Saturday? Madeline is coming day after to-morrow and I’ll write to Mr. Norris. Heaven send these days of sun continue. Now if we are to pay this call, and I am to catch my train, we must be off.”

Miss Quincy, having quarreled with her mother over her extravagance in buying a feather boa with the proceeds of her last small check, was seated by the window, industriously concocting a new hat. The Swedish “girl”, whose unfortunate fate it was to minister to the wants of Mrs. Olberg’s lodgers, gave a kind of defiant pound on the door, opened it and thrust in a disheveled blond head, followed by a hand puckered from the dish-water.

“Haar’s cards, Miss Quincy,” she said, “Dar’s twa ladies down staars.”

She dropped the cards on the floor and disappeared. Lena, in great curiosity, picked them up and read aloud:

“‘Mrs. Francis Lenox; Miss Elton.’”

“For the land’s sake! Who air they?” asked her mother.

“Two of the biggest swells in town.”

“Well, what on earth do they want here? We ain’t very swell.”

“Perhaps they want me to report some party or something,” said Lena.

She was losing no time in giving her hair one or two becoming jerks and going through a series of wriggles meant to impart grace and style to her costume.

“Perhaps they want to give you a million dollars,” said Mrs. Quincy sarcastically.

Lena, with heart burning with mingled shame at her own shabby surroundings, curiosity at their errand, and awe for the mighty names, entered the little parlor which gave the impression of never having been cleaned since it was born with its cheap worn plush furniture, its crayon portraits and its two vases of gaudy blue and gold. She faced the two ladies seated on the impossible chairs. Lena was almost as startling an apparition in that room as was Ram Juna’s rose in the dusty phial—whether a miracle or a clever trick. She looked so untouched by any vulgarity in her surroundings, so fresh and true, so instinct with virgin dignity, that the eyes that met her own were filled with the tribute of surprise; and she exulted in some hidden corner of her soul.

In the half-hour that they spent together she measured her new acquaintances carefully.

“And these are women of the world!” she said to herself. “Why, they’re boobies. I could do them up any time.”

For Lena did not know that women of this type are the most protected creatures on the face of the earth. The knowledge of good is given them, but not the knowledge of evil.

So she told them all about herself, which was what they seemed to want to hear, and when they went away Madeline said:

“I wonder if there are many such born to blush unseen. What an exquisite little tragedy she is!”

And Mrs. Lenox answered: “U—u—m! Well, I’ve asked her, haven’t I? I think the microbe of Dick’s impulsiveness must have got into me.”

Lena stood back in the shadow of the room to watch her departing guests. Then she ran up stairs with light steps, ruffling her plumes like a cocky little lady-wren as she went back to the dreariness where Mrs. Quincy sat rocking her inevitable creaking chair.

“Well!” asked her mother after a pause, a pause just long enough, the daughter knew, to fill her with irritable curiosity.

“Well,” Lena answered smartly, “and what do you think? They came to call, if you please, because Mr. Percival asked them to; and they were sweet as honey. And Mrs. Lenox asked me to spend a whole week at her country place.”

“For the land sake!”

“I guess,” Lena went on with complacence, “Mr. Percival must have said something pretty nice.”

Her mother stared at her speechless, and it was such an unusual thing for Mrs. Quincy to be struck dumb that Lena was correspondingly elated as she rattled on.

“Such dresses! I’d give anything to have such clothes and wear them with that kind of an every-day, don’t-care air. My, but Mrs. Lenox is a stunner! But the Lenoxes are just rolling in money; and they say Mr. Lenox hadn’t a red cent when she married him and gave him his start. It’s lucky I have another check coming from the Star. I’ll need more things than ever it will buy to go out there. I must begin to get ready right away.”

The mention of expenditure brought Mrs. Quincy back to her normal state of mind, and she resumed her rocking. Lena’s means and extremes in shopping were her standard grievance.

“I might know that ’ud be the next thing. Of course you’ll be spending every penny you can rake and scrape on clothes, so’s to look fine for your new fine friends. It’s no matter about me. I can go without a decent rag to my back, so long as you’ve got feathers and flummery.”

“Well, I earned the money. I don’t see why I shouldn’t spend it. I’m not robbing you,” said Lena sulkily.

“You might contribute a mite to your own board.”

“I’ll save you my board for a week,” snapped the girl.

Mrs. Quincy changed her tack. “And leave me shut up in town,” she resumed. “I should think you’d think twice, Lena, before you went off gallivantin’ and left your poor old mother here alone. Nobody seems to think I need any pleasure.”

“I’ll write and ask Mrs. Lenox if she won’t take you instead of me.”

“Take me! I should think not! I wouldn’t be hired to leave my own place and go off like a charity case among a lot of rich people who looked down on me because I was poor. I’ve got too much self-respect to jump at an invitation, like a pickerel at a frog. But there! You never think twice about things.”

“Suppose I did refuse. You’d fly out at me for not making the most of my chances,” said poor Lena, on the verge of tears.

Mrs. Quincy was temporarily silenced by the truth of this reply, and Lena pursued her advantage.

“Come now, mother, do you want me to get out of it?”

“Oh, I suppose you’ll have to go, or I won’t have no peace to my life,” Mrs. Quincy grudgingly responded.

“Yes, you shall. If you say so, I’ll give it up now and never say another word about it.”

“And act injured to death,” said her mother. “No, you go!”

“After you’ve done everything you can to spoil it for me,” answered Lena, not half realizing how well she spoke the truth, and how both by inheritance and by precept her mother had trailed the serpent over her life. To Lena, fortune and misfortune were still things of outward import, and almost synonymous with possession and non-possession. Yet, in spite of Mrs. Quincy’s dour looks, Lena found herself singing as she moved swiftly about the room. Spontaneous joy was a rare thing with her. The first peep into the delectable world was entrancing.