She gave Gita all the time she could spare, dined with her frequently, encouraged her to come to the office on Atlantic Avenue, and took her on several buying expeditions to Philadelphia and New York. She sometimes felt like a sculptor with a promising but singularly uncertain piece of clay in his hands: clay with unmalleable lumps and responsive but slippery surfaces. Gita was kicking off a slipper from an aching foot one night, when her leg was arrested in mid-air. Something had been tapping at her conscious plane for several weeks, an elusive something, gone before she could rake it to the light. Now it darted forward of its own accord, and it seemed to her that an actual entity took form in her brain, smiling significantly. For years she had had the same dream, and nearly every night. She had stood alone on a solitary mountain-peak, with barely a glimpse of the world below. The figure had been as aloof, as isolated, as the mountain itself. And it was always staring up at another peak, higher still. She realized that she had not had that dream for a month. “Well, much good may it do me,” she thought, as she kicked off the other slipper. “Coming down to brass tacks and liking them is all very well, but I still wish I had been a man.” And then, standing before the mirror arrayed in the daintiest of her nightgowns, she wondered if she did. She shrugged her shoulders, climbed into her ancestral four-poster and turned off the light by the bed. “Anyhow, I was born a philosopher,” she thought sincerely if erroneously, “and perhaps when I can afford a human bed I’ll feel more like the real thing. I might put bows on the corners.” CHAPTER X Gita, who was on her knees in the garden planting carnations, her favorite flower, but keeping one eye on Andrew and the new gardener, prepared to act summarily at any sign of violence on the old man’s part, turned her head as she heard a taxi rattle up the avenue. Then she sprang to her feet and ran toward the house. Her morning visitor was Elsie Brewster. “Is anything the matter?” she asked anxiously. It was only ten o’clock and Elsie had never accepted an invitation to luncheon. No man in Atlantic City was more sternly devoted to business between the hours of nine and five than the capable Mrs. Brewster. Elsie’s face, usually as placid as the pool in the woods, was flushed a bright pink and her eyes sparkled with excitement. “Something wonderful has happened!” she exclaimed. “And I had to come over and tell you at once.” “Don’t tell me you’re being sent to Europe!” Gita had a sensation of blank dismay at the prospect of separation from this resourceful and interesting friend, the only one whose constant companionship she had ever craved. “That wouldn’t excite me the least little bit. But don’t try to guess. I’ll tell you. Come into the library where it’s cool.”