And these were the first great days of the bloomer girl. She was legion. Sometimes her bloomers were bloomers, sometimes they were knickerbockers, sometimes little more than the tights of the racing breed. She was dusty, sweaty, loud. She was never the sort of girl you knew; but always appeared from the swarming, dingy back districts of the city. Sometimes she rode a single wheel, sometimes tandem with some male of the humpbacked breed and of the heavily muscled legs and the grotesquely curved handle bars. The bloomer girl was looked at askance by the well-bred folk of the shaded suburbs. Ministers thumped pulpits and harangued half-empty pews regarding this final moral, racial disaster while she rode dustily by the very doors. Henry, as he pedalled the long machine through back streets to the rendezvous, was glad that the twilight was falling fast. In his breast pocket were copy paper and pencils, in an outer pocket his little olive-green book. His white trousers were caught about the ankles with steel dips. Mamie kept him waiting. He hid both himself and the wheel in the shadows of the tall lilac bushes in the little village park. She came at length, said 'Hello!' and with a little deft unhooking, coolly stepped out of her skirt, rolled up that garment, thrust it under a bush, and stood before him in the sort of wheeling costume rarely seen in Sunbury save on Saturdays and Sundays when the Chicago crowds were pouring through. Henry stood motionless, silent, in the dusk. 'Well,' said she, smartly, 'are we riding?' Without a word he wheeled out the bicycle and they rolled away. She was very close, there before him. She bent over the handle bars like an old-timer, and pedalled with something more than the abandon of a boy. It was going to be hard to talk to her... If he could only blot this day out of his life. 'She started it,' he thought fiercely, staring out ahead over her rhythmically moving shoulder. 'I never asked her to come in!' 'I didn't know you rode a wheel,' said he, after a time, dismally. 'I ride Sundays with the boys from Pennyweather Point. But you needn't tell that at home.' 'I'm not telling anything at home,' muttered Henry. Then she flung back at him the one word. 'Surprised?' 'Well--why, sorta.' 'You thought I was satisfied to do the room work and wash dishes, I suppose!' 'I don't know as I thought anything.' 'What's the matter, anyway? Scared at my bloomers?' 'That's what you call'em, is it?' 'I must say you're grand company.' He made no reply. They pedalled past the university buildings, the athletic field, the lighthouse, up a grade between groves of oak, out along the brink of a clay bluff overlooking the steely dark lake--horizonless, still, a light or two twinkling far out. 'Shall we go to Hoffman's?' she asked. 'I don't care where we go,' said he. 6