"By the way," said Charles, pleasantly, "didn't I see you go by here with Miss Flower the other day? Where did you--" "Absolutely sick, and I've--" "Meet up with her, old fellow? Isn't she a--" "Sick!" roared Donald, and banged the door. He was a hopeless ignoramus, and Charles was the peer of the greatest authorities, living or dead. But the subject, beyond doubt, was the most complex and baffling in the whole field of Womanology. And Charles, standing and staring at that shut door, was possessed with the odd feeling that Donald had got the best of the argument, after all. Why must Mary _always_ be as independent as the Declaration, and more militant than a Prussian? V The emergency schedule withdrew Charles from the streets; he lunched in twenty minutes at Mrs. Herman's and spent the hour gained at his writing-table. With the completion of the short fiction, he resumed his walks to Berringer's. And now on Washington Street, the principal scene of his social life since he became a regular author, he saw again Miss Angela Flower. In five days, suddenly, he saw Miss Angela three times. Twice, as it happened, the two passed on opposite sides of the street, moving in contrary directions. But the third time he fairly overtook her, not a dozen steps from the door of the rich little Deming boys, to whom he taught the Elements all morning. He was pleased with the agreeable coincidence. He greeted Mary's so different cousin with a genuine warmth, springing spontaneously from his personal sense of a bond between them. And Miss Angela, it seemed, was not less glad to see him. "You don't know how nice it is," she laughed, a tinge of color in her smooth cheeks, "to see a familiar face, after blocks and blocks of strangers. And you're almost the only person I know, too!" Suiting his long stride to hers, he assured her that this state of affairs would pass quickly. "I got only a glimpse of you yesterday," he pursued. "Do you take your constitutionals at this time, too?" But she said, elusively, that she took them at all sorts of times. "It's my chief form of recreation at present, you see! But--I thought I might meet father up here--it's his time for coming home to lunch from the college. Only I seem just to miss him every day." He and the Womanly Woman walked a good half-mile together that day, and the authority enjoyed himself thoroughly. It was in the course of this walk that he evolved another phrase of scientific justification, viz.: "The Business of Supplying Beauty and Supplying Charm."