But when he had carefully dressed for it, and was immersed in its shallow flippancy, he reacted the other way. Lettuce sandwiches and lemonade!--Good God! Determined to dodge the rest of it, he sidled around to the garage, and sneaked out his car. When the fresh crest breeze sprayed over his face, he pressed on the accelerator, and only slowed with the turn into the road to the city. At his arrival before the darkened Meade bungalow, two voices reached him from Dorothy's lit boudoir. His feet scraped slowly up the steps; after two thoughtful feints, he pushed the bell. There was distaste already at what lay before him; life offered no new way out. "Turn the porch switch, Pelham," Dorothy called from above. "Read the papers.... We'll be down soon." So she even assumed his presence! The swinging door was pushed outward, a short while after he had balanced himself on the extreme edge of the swinging couch. A girl stepped out and walked over to him. He rose conventionally. "I'm Jane Lauderdale," she said, in a voice of pleasing, bell-like quality. "'Thea told me to amuse you, until she's ready. You are Mr. Judson?" As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke most clearly--those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with the unfeigned naivete of a child--a semblance heightened by a starlike radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes. The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother--a madonna. The live brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion, whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna; it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and worthiness. The impression of childish naivete, he soon found, must not be stretched too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism. Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to inquire about. "You'll be at her table Saturday evening?" "At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly. "Don't you dance?"