I didn’t want Dibley to have any chance to oversee the fact that this trip was a last inspiration of mine. I immersed myself, ostensibly, in cost estimates of our new can and bottling plant which I happened to have in my pocket, while I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into this game I’d entered with Cleopatra Doris Janvier. XV IN WHICH I ASSIST A GET-AWAY. She came into my car, blithe and smiling; at least she smiled at me. Every one looked up and every one, seeing that smile for me, put me down as lucky, I know. When she was past and out of the car, I could feel them gazing at me and wondering what I’d done to deserve such a smile. She was a gay, delightful maid. Suppose that, not having had the advantage of acquaintance at the Flamingo Feather, I had met her in an ordinary way. I’d have been mad over that girl. Heaven salvage my soul, I was anyway. She had a trick of playing up to me, which probably she used with everybody, but I never really saw it except with me. Anyway, she did it with me; and nobody else ever did. It was her trick of looking up quickly, when I was about to say something, and smiling in that pleasant way of hers (pleasant doesn’t half do it; but it has to go at that) as if she was always sure of something good every time I talked and as if she liked my line and me. When you’re decidedly slow and ordinary, that makes quite a hit. I sat figuring out her life. Put her down as twenty-two; then she was born during the year Janvier was out after his first term in the “long house” and while he was busy engraving the plates which sent him in again. Some one--she hadn’t said who--took her into the country for ten years. Maybe she had a mother then; maybe not; her mother had dropped out somewhere. She was about twelve, then, when her father got out again and began his famous “living Cleveland” series of engravings. Twelve, they say, is the child’s most impressionable age; the parent or guardian molds the future then. Now I knew nothing about the guardian, when the parent was in the “long house,” but I had considerable information about father; and I could imagine him emerging from the pen all filled with eagerness to be back at his game of showing up the government engravers and of getting away with what he’d tried twice. Wally Bailey had given me a graphic glimpse of Janvier and his aim which, from one point of view, was actually a pursuit of perfection. What Wally suggested was that Janvier wanted, more than anything else, the satisfaction of doing the thing which had stumped him. That was what he wanted his sight back for,--to have a go at it again. And here he had it. His daughter was helping him, naturally. She’d been born and bred to his business and surely had caught something of the spirit of her father who wouldn’t give in, in spite of three terms, till he’d shown up the government.