"Do not look so helpless, dear. I'm only back three months from a trip round the world, and I've been putting up with hotel life meanwhile. Then I happened to meet you, and as long as you had me all sized up I just let it go--that's all, dear." "You're not the Mr. Adam Chase who's had the rose suite on the tenth floor all winter?" "That's me," he laughed. Her slowly comprehending eyes did not leave his face. "Why, I thought--I--you--" "It was my use of the private elevator on the east side of the building that gave you the Sixth Avenue idea, and it was too good a joke on me to spoil, dearie." She regarded him through blurry eyes. "What must you think of me?" He felt for her hand underneath the lap-robe. "Among other things," he said, "I think that your eyes exactly match the violets I motored out to get for you this morning at my place ten miles up the Hudson." "When did you go, dear?" "Before you were up. We were back before ten, in spite of a spark-plug that gave us some trouble." "Oh," she said. The figure at the wheel squirmed to be off. She lay back faint against the upholstery. "To think," she said, "that you should care for me!" "My own dear girl!" He touched a spring and the back of her seat reclined like a Morris chair. "Lie back, dear. I invented that scheme so I can recline at night and watch the stars parade past. I toured that way all through Egypt." The figure in the front seat gripped his wheel. "Where are we going, Adam dear?" she whispered. "This is your night, Gertrude; give James your orders." She snuggled deeper into the dark-red upholstery, and their hands clasped closer beneath the robe. "James," she said, in a voice like a bell, "take us to the Vista for dinner; afterward motor out along the Palisade drive, far out so that we can see the Hudson by moonlight." OTHER PEOPLE'S SHOES At the close of a grilling summer that had sapped the life from the city as insidiously as fever runs through veins and licks them up--at the close of a day that had bleached the streets as dry as desert bones--Abe Ginsburg closed his store half an hour earlier than usual because his clerk, Miss Ruby Cohn, was enjoying a two days' vacation at the Long Island Recreation Farm, and because a staggering pain behind his eyes and zigzag down the back of his neck to his left shoulder-blade made the shelves of shoe-boxes appear as if they were wavering with the heat-dance of the atmosphere and ready to cast their neatly arranged stock in a hopeless fuddle on the center of the floor. Up-stairs, on an exact level with the elevated trains that tore past the kitchen windows like speed monsters annihilating distance, Mrs. Ginsburg poised a pie-pan aloft on the tips of five fingers and waltzed a knife round the rim of the tin. A ragged ruffle of dough swung for a moment; she snipped it off, leaving the pie pat and sleek.