"Well there isn't much further to go on, I am glad for your sake. I soon abandoned music, which I love all the better for not being forced to write about it. I felt strange at the opera house, I didn't become closely acquainted with my colleagues, so I was glad when the "Clarion" gave me the berth of dramatic critic. Now I can fight every day with erudite William Winter--Lord! how that little man can write English-- over the Ibsen problem. Wagner is accepted here, yet a more original thinker, Henrik Ibsen, is slighted, is even called immoral, he the most moral of dramatists. Let's go for a ride," he exclaimed, "a beautiful day wasted over sterile aesthetics. What do you say--Miss Mona?" (That's twice he called me Mona!) She consented. The prospect of a trip through the park sitting next to this lively young man pleased her. "We shan't take a cab. I like a hansom better. Don't you love the good old English hansom with the slightly shabby but always sympathetic driver wearing a battered silk hat tipped on the side of his disreputable skull? Besides Miss Mona--a hansom is Cupid's chariot. Let's go." When Ulick started in earnest he was irresistible. He hailed a hansom. They hopped in. To the park! VII "Haven't I been rather discursive?" he had asked of her. "I don't think so," she had curtly contradicted. Forsooth, she didn't think that he had been discursive. She was rather disappointed. The brilliant verbal fireworks she had been taught by her brother to expect from Ulick had fizzled--she thought. It was only that night, after she had put Dolly to sleep, that she assembled her memories of the afternoon and then she realized the conversation might be truthfully described as discursive; fragmentary would be a better word. He is nice, she ruminated. Now you dear naughty dolly don't you pretend to be asleep when I see one of your eyes watching me ... little sneak, I believe you are jealous.... Oh! he is so nice Dolly.... She buried her face in the cool bed linen--There! I'll whip you for your mean jealousy--I'm fond of Ulick--my great Jewel of a man.... Dolly's head was lost under a pillow. Mona fell into a dreamless slumber.... She said nothing next morning to her mother about the impromptu luncheon and casually remarked that she would go for a walk in the afternoon, not far, she added. She didn't think it necessary to tell that she was going to the Metropolitan Museum, a few blocks away, there to meet Ulick Invern, who had promised to show her Manet's "Boy with a Sword" and to describe the personality of the painter, with whom he had been acquainted in Paris. It was to be a glorious afternoon devoted entirely to art. Ulick was so artistic and she so ignorant.... VIII