"I know it," Nancy agreed, with New England colloquialism. "You feel reasonably allied to them as a sex, and then suddenly they show some vulgar preference for a woman like that, and it's all off." "This from the woman who thinks my chauffeur is an ideal of manly beauty," Dick scoffed, "a dimpled man with a little finger ring." "He can run a car, though," Nancy retorted. "I'll bet little blue eyes could run a restaurant." "That was just the trouble,--she would have been running mine in twenty-four hours. Oh! I think what you men really like is a bossy woman." "Now, what a woman really likes in a man--" Betty began, "is--is--" "Quality," Nancy finished for her succinctly. "I wonder--" Dick mused. "I should have said finish." "Almost any kind of finish so long as it is smooth enough," Billy supplemented. "Look at the way they eat up this artistic and poetic veneer." "Look at the way they mangle their metaphors," Nancy complained to Betty. * * * * * "I know what I really like in a woman," Dick whispered to Nancy, as he helped her into her coat just before they started out together, "and you know what I like, too. That's one of the subjects that needs no discussion between us." Betty and Billy walking up the avenue ahead of them,--Outside Inn was located in one of the cross-streets in the thirties,--were discussing their relation to one another. "I wonder sometimes if Nancy's got it in her really to care for a man," Betty argued; "she's as fond as she can be of Dick, but she'd sacrifice him heart, soul and body for that restaurant of hers. She's a perfect darling, I don't mean that; she's the very essence of sweetness and kindness, but she doesn't seem to understand or appreciate the possibilities of a devotion like Dick's. Do you think she's really capable of loving anybody--of putting any man in the world before all her ideas and notions and experiments?" "Lord, yes," said Billy, accelerating his pace, suggestively in the hope of getting Betty home in good time for him to dress to keep his engagement with Caroline. CHAPTER III INAUGURATION