Fanny responded from Eastlake in a tone of unending patience; nothing he could do, her voice intimated, would exhaust her first consideration of him; she wouldn't--how could she?--question the wisdom of his decisions, even when they seemed, but, of course, only to her faulty understanding, incomprehensible. “You make it sound as though I were over here on an errand of my own,” he protested cheerfully; “I'd rather be in Eastlake.” Helena, she told him, had been bad again; there was a recognized opinion between them that, while Gregory was like his mother, Helena surprisingly resembled Lee Randon. “Well, don't be too severe,” he said. Someone had to be, the reply came, faint and indistinct. “Is there anything else?” he asked. Of course, how stupid, she was keeping him; the sound was now open and colored with self-reproach. She was so sorry. “Damn!” Lee exclaimed, leaving the telephone with the feeling that Fanny had repelled his affection. Women were beyond him. In this mood he was unprepared for the appearance of Mina Raff, immediately after his name was sent up to her rooms, on the minute arranged. What, next, about her occurred to him was the evidence of her weariness. A short and extremely romantic veil hung from the close brim of her hat--with her head bent forward she gazed at him seriously through the ornamental filaments; her chin raised, the intent regard of her celebrated eyes was unhampered. She didn't care where they went, she replied to his question, except that she preferred a quiet place, where they could talk. The St. Regis, he thought, would best answer this requirement; and he had started toward the taxi-cab stand when she informed him that she had kept her car. It was larger and more elaborately fitted than the Grove limousine; in its deep upholstery, its silk curtains and velvet carpet and gold mounted vanities, Mina Raff was remarkably child-like, small; her face, brightening at intervals in the rapidly passing lights outside, was touched by pathos; she seemed crushed by the size, the swiftness and complexity, of her automobile, and by the gathering imperious weight of her fame. She was still, however, appealingly simple; no matter what she might do it would be invested with the aspect of innocence which, admirable for her art, never for an instant deserted her personality. Lee Randon, who liked her better with each accumulating minute, wondered why he was completely outside the disturbance of her charm. As a young man, he concluded, he would have been lost in a passionate devotion to her. Mina realized to the last possible indefinite grace the ideal, always a silver abstraction, of youth; the old worn simile of an April moon, distinguished in her case by the qualification, wistful, was the most complete description of her he possessed. Young men--Peyton Morris--were worshippers of the moon, the unattainable; and when they happily attained a reality they hid it in iridescent fancy.