“You know I’m an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that’s why I like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils and the drawing board—the whole thing.” “Why did you give it up, then?” “Nothing in it.” “How do you mean—nothing in it?” “No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I’d hung on——” “And then you became a banker, h’m? Well, there ought to be money enough in a bank.” He was a little nettled. “I wasn’t a banker—at first. I was a bond salesman.” Her brows met in a little frown. Her eyebrows were thick and strongly marked and a little uneven and inclined to meet over her nose. Paula’s brows were a mere line of black—a carefully traced half-parenthesis above her unmysterious dark eyes. “I’d rather,” Dallas said, slowly, “plan one back door of a building that’s going to help make this town beautiful and significant than sell all the bonds that ever floated a—whatever it is that bonds are supposed to float.” He defended himself. “I felt that way, too. But you see my mother had given me my education, really. She worked for it. I couldn’t go dubbing along, earning just enough to keep me. I wanted to give her things. I wanted——” “Did she want those things? Did she want you to give up architecture and go into bonds?” “Well—she—I don’t know that she exactly——” He was too decent—still too much the son of Selina DeJong—to be able to lie about that. “You said you were going to let me meet her.” “Would you let me bring her in? Or perhaps you’d even—would you drive out to the farm with me some day. She’d like that so much.” “So would I.” He leaned toward her, suddenly. “Listen, Dallas. What do you think of me, anyway?” He wanted to know. He couldn’t stand not knowing any longer. “I think you’re a nice young man.” That was terrible. “But I don’t want you to think I’m a nice young man. I want you to like me—a lot. Tell me, what haven’t I got that you think I ought to have? Why do you put me off so many times? I never feel that I’m really near you. What is it I lack?” He was abject. “Well, if you’re asking for it. I do demand of the people I see often that they possess at least a splash of splendour in their makeup. Some people are nine tenths splendour and one tenth tawdriness, like Gene Meran. And some are nine tenths tawdriness and one tenth splendour, like Sam Huebch. But some people are all just a nice even pink without a single patch of royal purple.” “And that’s me, h’m?” He was horribly disappointed, hurt, wretched. But a little angry, too. His pride. Why, he was Dirk DeJong, the most successful of Chicago’s younger men; the most promising; the most popular. After all, what did she do but paint commercial pictures for fifteen hundred dollars apiece? “What happens to the men who fall in love with you? What do they do?” Dallas stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “They usually tell me about it.” “And then what?” “Then they seem to feel better and we become great friends.”