“I don’t flatter.”

“Don’t flatter yourself that you don’t. For your age, you’re the worst I ever knew. But that is just the point. I will write to Mrs. Ferry that the young man amuses Gratia, and that his enthusiasms succeed each other rapidly.”

“Miss Kate, I’m so much obliged that I am going to kiss you.”

She screamed, for she felt herself lifted clean off her feet. He held her in mid-air, kissed her on the lips, set her down, and received a stinging cuff on the ear.

Gratia Ferry came running. “What in the world is he doing?”

“Kissing me in the dark.”

“That’s because he wanted to kiss Cynthy. That vampire is after him every minute, and he was just dying to kiss her.”

“So I was, and Mrs. Hogg is dying to have you call her by her name.”

“It’s a horrid name,” said Gratia. “She married it, and so she has to make the best of it, but I certainly shan’t.”

“Shan’t what?” cried Marvin.

But Gratia was already gone.

Chapter 5. Boron

The great factory to which Jimmy had been invited lies to the west of Chicago, and at sunset its multitudinous windows make it look like a low long crystal, flaming.

A few miles west of it lived a woman well known to Susan Endicott Hogg, though they had long been separated. It was a woman who had thrown herself away on a mere professor. In spite of Susan’s domineering will, her dearly beloved Winifred had married a pauper nearly twice her own age.

He was, to be sure, an authority on the decline of the Roman Empire. There used to be many such authorities, but the fashion of inquiring why Rome fell has rather gone out. And except for being known to scholars as the editor of the definitive edition of Tacitus, this authority was obscure. He was only Dr. Ambrose Rich, professor in Warrenville College, and sixty-nine years old.

Warrenville College was itself obscure, if for no other reason than that it had never succeeded in lopping off its preparatory department. It was not like the bolts and screws in the Ferry factory, 

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