"Cupid in a sweater!" Adoree exclaimed. "Well, I believe it, for your playing made me positively mushy. I've been hugging a sofa-cushion and dreaming of heroes for ever so long. Why, at this moment I'd marry the janitor." With the eager shyness of a boy he inquired: "Do you really like to hear me play? Can I come and play for you again?" "Not without a chaperon," she told him, positively; "wool tickles my cheek." Pope rose hastily and in some embarrassment. He could write about love with a cynic's pen, but he could not bear to talk about it even in a joking way. He eyed the speaker with the frightened fascination of a charmed rabbit, until she laughed in mischievous enjoyment of his perturbation. "Oh, never fear! It will take more than music to make me forget what you are. Say!" She yawned, doubled up her little fists, and stretched. "Won't you play something to make those lovers go home, so I can go to bed?" He shook his head. "Not until we go to the nearest cafe and have a bite to eat." "There are no cafes open at this hour." In spite of her protestations that she was not hungry he bore her away with him, bareheaded as she was, and in the next block they found an unsuspected little place called the "Chauffeurs' Lunch," where a man was busy making sandwiches of the whitest bread and the most delicious-smelling Hamburger for a hungry cabby with a battered hat. And there they each ate a bowl of crackers and milk with a baked apple, using the arms of their chairs for tables. Pope's bill was forty cents, and, strangely enough, not even when he paid it did he remember that this was the woman for whose company at supper other men paid five hundred dollars. CHAPTER XXV Bob's work as a salesman continued to be so effective that Kurtz finally offered him a salaried position. But instead of accepting, Bob made a counter-proposition that caused the little man to gasp. Briefly, it was to extend the scope of the present business by laying in a stock of extravagant, high-priced shirt and necktie materials, with Bob as partner in the new venture. Kurtz protested that he was not a haberdasher, but he was constrained to admit that Bob had the right idea of smart business, and after some discussion accepted his employee's nonchalant offer to go halves on the new venture and share in its profits. The fact that Bob had no money with which to carry through his part of the deal troubled that youth not in the least--Kurtz's credit was ample. Bob's theory of securing the Fifth Avenue trade was to double existing prices, and if this did not bring the business, to double them a second time; and this theory was correct, as he demonstrated when the new department was organized.