"You've never forgiven me for--for saying what I did that night. You know you haven't! But if you'd ever come to see me--so that we could really have a talk--I feel I could make you understand that I--never really meant it!" The maiden's gaze at once embarrassed and vastly depressed him. In it he read, as if spread upon a bill-board, her soft certainty that, though he himself might not realize it yet, he was her man.... In the restaurant, the four or five entirely masculine persons with whom Charles commonly lunched took note of his peculiar gloom. It was their whim to assume that a valued pupil had just discharged Charles without a character. Theirs was a crude and noisy wit. But the tutor ignored, hardly heard, their gibes. He sat withdrawn and silent over his chicken hash (for which Berringer had no less than fourteen different names). And before his fascinated mind's eye there unrolled an endless vista of driving duets, with the gentle feminine pressure closing down ever more and more irresistibly upon him. What to do, what to do? That was the question. There did not seem to be a corner of the city now where the Fordette did not go poking its ugly mug. All very well to say: Be bold, be cold. Refuse under any conditions to get into the Fordette. That, to him, was simply not a possible line of conduct. Inability to be successfully rude to people, even under the most favorable circumstances, had long been recognized as the damnable flaw in his character. And as to this very peculiar case--how could the roughest boor, the most thoroughgoing cad, repel and affront a nice young girl whom he voluntarily kissed but last month--one whose only fault, after all, was a fatal constancy? Now he fairly confronted the two distinct and fundamental weaknesses in his position: the moral and the mechanical, the Kiss and the Fordette. A just thinker always, he would not deny, even now, that it was his own free-will act that had first altered everything. If he took the ground that he had kissed, with warmth, a girl he cared nothing on earth about, what sort of person did that make him? No better than a Frenchman, daft about La Femme. She, it could not be gainsaid, really paid him a finer compliment, took the nobler view of him, when she assumed that those salutes had signified something. She was not without right to her naïve confidence. And now that she had this maidenly expectancy firmly mounted upon a gasoline engine--do what he would, he could not escape a ripening affection. She would get a call out of him yet. There would be another bridge-party, and he would be at it. And after the bridge-party.... Alone with his thoughts among his noisy companions, Charles drew a handkerchief across his brow. A Home was, indeed, a sweet and beautiful thing. But the positive fact was that he, Charles, did NOT want one made for him at present. And still, the soft advance that leads straight to Homes pressed resistlessly on.