Ginger liked her cool compliments. She liked everything she did with Mary Wiley. Perhaps, best of all, she liked the luncheons at the Woman’s City Club and the Query Club and others to which her friend belonged or went as a guest, where she--Ginger--might sit in mouselike silence and hear brisk and vigorous talk. Mary Wiley sometimes spoke, quietly and effectively. Once, in the midst of a discussion on the iniquities of the retailer, she said suddenly--“I think Miss McVeagh could tell us something of interest on that subject; you know, she owns and operates one of the largest cattle ranches in her part of California.” “That _baby_?” A lean, elderly woman bent forward in her seat and smiled at Ginger, and--her cheeks crisping hotly--she heard herself speaking. It was incredible that they should all stop, those keen and purposeful women--and listen to Ginger McVeagh, but they did. “Did you get that, Helen?” she heard them saying to each other when she had finished her three or four sentences. “That’s all she gets a pound--and consider what we pay our local butchers!” Several came and spoke to her afterward; California was always a name to conjure with, they said, but a California cattle ranch-- They made her feel definite and worth while; once Mary Wiley asked half a dozen of them in to meet her at tea, and made her wear the red peasant dress. But most of all she found herself at the Symphony. When she was homesick, which was often, in spite of her new contentment, she found that music--not solo things nor chamber music, but the crash and volume of an orchestra--most nearly approximated the breadth and freedom of her life at home. Sitting beside her friend or quite alone, serenely ignorant of composition and composer and interdependence of instrument, she was as wholly content as when she was riding Felipe or Diablo into the heart of a sunset. When she tried, gropingly, to tell Mary Wiley what she felt, she quoted to her a line of Huneker’s; it ought, she thought, to be graven over the door of every concert hall: “Other arts give us defined pleasures, but music is the only art that restores us to ourselves.” It restored Ginger not only to herself but to her lover. Whether they ever came together again, whether she ever saw him again, sitting perched in her high balcony seat in Carnegie Hall, all the pride and criticism and bitterness were cleansed away; she went to him once more as she had gone to him on Aleck’s bridge; she found harmony in harmony. “You are radiant,” said Mary Wiley to her as they came away from Carnegie on an afternoon of dazzling snow. “I knew you would love Tschaikowsky. You look--my dear, did you love it so much?” Ginger fell into step beside her. “Let’s walk, shall we? Yes; I loved it. But I was thinking just then about--Mary, I would like to go to Boston.” “Would you, really? How warmly mother will approve of you for that chaste desire!”