Miss Grace, it must be known, was a Temporary Spinster, verging toward Permanence; she was round, gentle, blonde, by no means displeasing or ill-looking. Had the world been the normal place Old Tories took it to be, Miss Grace would undoubtedly have been one of those happy women who find themselves, at twenty-five, with a home, a husband, and three darling little curly-headed children; and there were a hundred signs that so she would have found full happiness indeed. But the world being not normal now, but, on the contrary, in Unrest, something remote had gone wrong with Miss Grace, parting her from her manifest destiny. Perhaps the panic of 1907 was to blame, or a decrease in the visible gold supply; perhaps the trouble was in that hard saying of the Redmantlers, that Love was going out. At any rate, here hung Miss Grace on the parent stem in Washington Street, a Waiting Woman: the non-understanding and unaccounted-for Anomaly in a disordered social system; an adult human being thirty-two years old, with nothing upon earth to do. Miss Grace's subjects were Sociology and the History of the World. An agreeable soul herself, she noted that her tutor's manner this afternoon was taciturn and distrait. As he was concluding his remarks upon the thirty pages of Lester Ward that made her lesson, she noted that he lost his thread suddenly, and left a sentence permanently hanging in mid-air. Back into the tutor's head, in fact, the artless questionings of another had popped with arresting force: "_Is this where you teach every afternoon? You get out about half-past four?_" From taciturn, Mr. Garrott's manner became restless and rather irritable. And when the hour of four-thirty arrived, he did not snap his watch at Miss Grace and depart at once, according to his almost invariable habit. No, he moved in a novel manner, to the drawing-room window. And he stood there, oddly and irresolutely, gazing out, first up the street and then down. Why had he mentioned that the lesson lasted an hour usually? Why hadn't he said, frankly, that it lasted till five or six o'clock, and often later? Slowly but surely the idea was being established that it was the natural and usual thing for him and Angela to drive in the old Fordette every day. It was time for him definitely to break up this idea. Otherwise, what was to be the end of it all?--that was what he wanted to know. More and more he seemed to become aware of a gentle claim, an indescribable pressure, very soft, yet rather alarmingly sure. Why on earth couldn't she be satisfied just to be pleasant friends once more? Why all this talk of future meetings, of seeing you again all the time?