"Miss--Mrs. Connor, I didn't mean to be rude." "You were a little, you know." "Will you excuse me?" "Why, of course." He didn't quite know what to do next, so he awkwardly extended his hand. She took it with a man-to-man shake of wiping out the score, which completely demolished his cynical attitude in reference to platonic friendship. "Where were you bound for?" he asked. "Nowhere, just strolling. Over to the lake front for a breath of air." "May I walk along?" "Surely." On their way back they reflected that they had been without lunch, so they stopped at a drug store for a malted milk with egg, chocolate flavor, nutmeg on top. They touched their glasses together. "It's very nourishing," said he with wonderment. "Very," she replied, delightedly; "very." They returned to their work in that state of high elation induced by interviews such as theirs, wherein the spoken words mean twenty times what they say--and more. IX THE PRETENDERS Georgia and Mason did not overpass the outward signs and boundaries of platonism, learning to avoid not merely evil, but the appearance of evil. When they met in the hundred-eyed office they were casual. During the autumn they took long walks together every Sunday. There had been a dry spell that year, lasting with hardly a break from the fore part of June, which baked the land and sucked out the wells and put the Northern woods in danger of their lives. The broad corn leaves withered yellow and the husbandmen of the great valley protested that the ears were but "lil' nubbins with three inches of nuthin' at the tips, taperin' down to a point, and where'll we get our seed next spring?" When the huge downpour came at last and by its miracle saved the crop which had been given up for lost a fortnight since, Mason cursed the day, for it fell on the first day of the week and cost him, item, one walk and talk with Georgia Connor. She stood so near his eyes as to hide from his sight a billion bushels parching in the valley--though he was country bred. To her their Sundays together brought not a joy as definite as his, but rather a sense of contentment, of relief from the precision of the other days of her week. It pleased her to wander to the big aviary and look at the condors and cockatoos and wonder about South America where they came from, then to stroll slowly over to the animals and have a vague difference of opinion with him about whether a lion could whip a tiger. She thought so because the lion was the king of beasts, but Mason didn't, because he'd read of a fight where it had been tried. Once he even grew a trifle heated because she wouldn't listen to reason and fact and stuck to the lion because he'd been called the king of beasts, whereas all naturalists knew the elephant and the gorilla and the rhinoc---- There she interrupted him with a laugh and called him a boy and too literal.