"It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was so graceful, that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity. The manager said, 'Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants to pays his respecks.' She looked up in a sullen way, and the chimpanzee showed his teeth at me, and I mumbled something about expecting to see the name Mamise up in the big electric lights. "She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned fool, and I agreed with her then--and since. She said, 'Much obliged' in a contemptuous contralto and--and turned to the other monkey. "The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop, knocked down a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the alley. I was mad at her at first, but afterward I always respected her for snubbing me. I never saw her again, never saw her name again. As for the big electric lights, I was a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric lights in my--my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She may be dead now. "It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came along she--well, as she didn't, she must have been a good girl, don't you suppose?" The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and stacks of corn, with pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise. "What do you call a good girl?" she asked. "That's a hard question to answer nowadays." "Why nowadays?" "Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful and our ideas of girls are so much more--complicated. Anyway, as the fellow said, that's my story. And now you know all about Mamise that I know. Can you forgive her for wearing your name?" "I could forgive that Mamise anything," she sighed. "But this Mamise I can't forgive at all." This puzzled him. "I don't quite get that." She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong of what helpless writers call "a shady dell"; its tenderness won from him a timid confession. "You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are as different as can be, and yet somehow you remind me of each other." "Somehow we are each other." He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him a hasty glance from the road. She was blushing. He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, "It's a small world, after all." He nearly swung to the other extreme. "Well, I'll be--" He settled like a dying pendulum on, "Well--well!" They both laughed, and he put out his hand. "Pleased to meet you again." She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant. The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a long, steep cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted. The whir of the engine stopped. The car sailed softly.