Through the blue-gold blur of autumn afternoons they would drift off to a matinée or he would accompany her shopping. There was a peculiar intimacy attaching to being made the witness of her girlish purchases. She would take him into a millinery shop and try on a dozen hats, referring always to his judgment. The assistant would delight him by mistaking him for her husband. Desire would correct the wrong impression promptly by saying: “I don’t know which one I’ll choose; I guess I’ll have to bring my mother.” In the street she would confess to him that she’d done it for a lark and hadn’t intended to buy anything. “But why do they all--waiters and everybody--think that we’re married?” “Perhaps because we were made for each other, and look it.” She would twist her shoulders with a pretense of annoyance; her gray eyes would become cloudy as opals. “That’s stupid. I’m so young--only twenty.” On one of these excursions she filled him with joy by accepting from him a dozen pairs of silk-stockings. He was perpetually begging her to let him spend his money on her and she was perpetually refusing. “You tempt me, Meester Deek. What would people think?” “I don’t know and don’t care. People be hanged. There aren’t any people--only you and I alone in the world. How’d you like a new set of furs?” “Now, do be good,” she would beg of him, eyeing the furs enviously. “I don’t know,” he told her, “whether you really mean no or yes.” “And perhaps I don’t know myself,” she mocked him. Later, when wild-flowers of the streets flamed in the hedges of the dusk, they would again postpone their parting. Some new palace would magically spring up to lure them. Then they would dine to music and she would insist on acting the hostess and serving him; sometimes by seeming inadvertence their hands would touch. They would dawdle over their coffee; like a mother humoring a child full of fancies, at his repeated request she would sweeten his cup with the lips that were forbidden him. They might sit on all evening; they might stroll languorously off to find a new stimulus to illusion in a theatre. Their evenings were intolerably fugitive. Before midnight they would ride uptown through the carnival of Broadway, where light foamed on walls of blackness like champagne poured across ebony. At first he was inclined to be dissatisfied that he gained so little ground: when he advanced, she retreated; when he retreated, she advanced. If, to woo him back to a proper demonstrativeness, she had to display some new familiarity, she was careful not to let it become a habit. “The more stand-offish I am with you,” he said, “the more sweet you are to me. Directly I start to fall in love with you again----” “Again?” she questioned, with a raising of her brows. “Again,” he repeated stubbornly. “Directly I do that, you grow cold. The thing works automatically like a pair of scales--only we hardly ever balance. When you’re up, I’m down. When I’m up, you’re down.”