“Say what your own kind heart prompts.” It had been rather a long time since Christine had been accused of having a kind heart. Not that she was unkind, but in all her self-centered young life there had been little call on her sympathies. Her eyes clouded. “I wish I were as good as you think I am.” There was a little silence between them. Then Le Moyne spoke briskly:-- “I'll tell you how to get there; perhaps I would better write it.” He moved over to Christine's small writing-table and, seating himself, proceeded to write out the directions for reaching Hillfoot. Behind him, Christine had taken his place on the hearth-rug and stood watching his head in the light of the desk-lamp. “What a strong, quiet face it is,” she thought. Why did she get the impression of such a tremendous reserve power in this man who was a clerk, and a clerk only? Behind him she made a quick, unconscious gesture of appeal, both hands out for an instant. She dropped them guiltily as K. rose with the paper in his hand. “I've drawn a sort of map of the roads,” he began. “You see, this--” Christine was looking, not at the paper, but up at him. “I wonder if you know, K.,” she said, “what a lucky woman the woman will be who marries you?” He laughed good-humoredly. “I wonder how long I could hypnotize her into thinking that.” He was still holding out the paper. “I've had time to do a little thinking lately,” she said, without bitterness. “Palmer is away so much now. I've been looking back, wondering if I ever thought that about him. I don't believe I ever did. I wonder--” She checked herself abruptly and took the paper from his hand. “I'll go to see Tillie, of course,” she consented. “It is like you to have found her.” She sat down. Although she picked up the book that she had been reading with the evident intention of discussing it, her thoughts were still on Tillie, on Palmer, on herself. After a moment:-- “Has it ever occurred to you how terribly mixed up things are? Take this Street, for instance. Can you think of anybody on it that--that things have gone entirely right with?” “It's a little world of its own, of course,” said K., “and it has plenty of contact points with life. But wherever one finds people, many or few, one finds all the elements that make up life--joy and sorrow, birth and death, and even tragedy. That's rather trite, isn't it?” Christine was still pursuing her thoughts. “Men are different,” she said. “To a certain extent they make their own fates. But when you think of the women on the Street,--Tillie, Harriet Kennedy, Sidney Page, myself, even Mrs. Rosenfeld back in the alley,--somebody else moulds things for us, and all we can do is to sit back and suffer. I am beginning to think the world is a terrible place, K. Why do people so often marry the wrong people? Why can't a man care for one woman and only one all his life? Why--why is it all so complicated?” “There are men who care for only one woman all their lives.”