“Really, I like it,” he protested. “I hang over a desk all day, and in the evening I want to walk. I ramble around the park and see lovers on benches—it's rather thrilling. They sit on the same benches evening after evening. I know a lot of them by sight, and if they're not there I wonder if they have quarreled, or if they have finally got married and ended the romance. You can see how exciting it is.”
Quite suddenly Sidney laughed.
“How very nice you are!” she said—“and how absurd! Why should their getting married end the romance? And don't you know that, if you insist on walking the streets and parks at night because Joe Drummond is here, I shall have to tell him not to come?”
This did not follow, to K.'s mind. They had rather a heated argument over it, and became much better acquainted.
“If I were engaged to him,” Sidney ended, her cheeks very pink, “I—I might understand. But, as I am not—”
“Ah!” said K., a trifle unsteadily. “So you are not?”
Only a week—and love was one of the things she had had to give up, with others. Not, of course, that he was in love with Sidney then. But he had been desperately lonely, and, for all her practical clearheadedness, she was softly and appealingly feminine. By way of keeping his head, he talked suddenly and earnestly of Mrs. McKee, and food, and Tillie, and of Mr. Wagner and the pencil pad.
“It's like a game,” he said. “We disagree on everything, especially Mexico. If you ever tried to spell those Mexican names—”
“Why did you think I was engaged?” she insisted.
Now, in K.'s walk of life—that walk of life where there are no toothpicks, and no one would have believed that twenty-one meals could have been secured for five dollars with a ticket punch thrown in—young girls did not receive the attention of one young man to the exclusion of others unless they were engaged. But he could hardly say that.
“Oh, I don't know. Those things get in the air. I am quite certain, for instance, that Reginald suspects it.”
“It's Johnny
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