her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in overhearing them—theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here again he was wrong. She was saying: “Round and round—not up and down. My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round—” 

 Then two young men—boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they were saying, “I haven’t pitched a game since before the war, but he said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so—” Ben saw that he was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him, too. 

 As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world enough attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very revivifying antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself an entrance to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly, Ben always thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate the occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring dance among the Indians. 

 And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came through the window—lovely with that particular and specific kind of loveliness which Ben thought of when he used the word—his kind. He used to wonder afterward how he had known it at that first glimpse, for, in the dim light of the piazza, he could not see some of her greatest beauties—the whiteness of her skin, white as milk where her close, fine, brown hair began, or the blue of the eyes set at an angle which might have seemed Oriental in eyes less enchanting turquoise in color. But he could see her slenderness and grace. She was dressed in clinging blues and greens and she wore a silver turban. She leaned her hands on the railings—she turned them out along the railings; they were slender and full of character—not soft. Ben looked at the one nearest him. With hardly more than a turn of his head he could have kissed it. The idea appealed to him strongly; he played with it, just as when he was a child in a college town he had played with the idea of getting up in church and walking about on the backs of the pews. This would be pleasanter, and the subsequent getaway even easier. He glanced at the dark lawn behind him; there appeared to be no obstacle to escape. 

 Perhaps, under the spell of her attraction for him, and the knowledge that he would never see her again, he might actually have done it, but she broke the trance by speaking to a tall, stolid young man who was with her. 

 “No, Eddie,” she said, as if answering something he 

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