The Duchess assumed a “this-is-what-I-have-to-endure” expression while Nathan tried to find his tongue. Referring to this girl’s risk of accident between the Forge residence and the business section as an up-ending was embarrassing to the ninth degree. “If I’m going your way, I’d be glad to see you safe home,” the boy volunteered. “Oh, that’s so sweet of you!” responded the girl. She found her gray lambskin muff, buried the lower part of her oval face in it, looked slantwise at Nathan and laughed that mischievous giggle again. They went down the steps to the sidewalk. It was a stinging cold night. The sky was clear, deep sapphire. The full moon resembled a Japanese print, shining through bare, gaunt limbs of winter-creaking trees. “I better take your arm, Miss Gardner,” the boy suggested. “You might fall down at that.” “Grab hold!” the girl assented. Nathan slid his hand in the warm aperture between her right sleeve and her soft body. His fingers closed about that plump arm delicately. The girl in red and gray, a head shorter than himself, pressed against him with the usual helplessness of the man-escorted female. And at contact with her body thus—in that instant—he knew he had grown a man. Miss Gardner slipped on the Pine Street walk, whether by accident or design is unknown. The thing that counted was that Nathan caught her in time and she did not resent it. In fact, she rather enjoyed it. She laughed gleefully and turned her small, snub-nosed face up to his, coyly and viciously close. “I’m awfully clumsy,” she confided. She did not enlighten him whether she was equally clumsy when walking without an escort. This opened conversational possibilities. Nathan averred that she was nothing of the sort. So they traversed two blocks, Miss Gardner insisting that she was clumsy and Nathan making it his portion of the argument that she was not. Anybody might slip on the old icy walks, as icy as they were around the little old town of Paris. They had a rotten old lot of selectmen—no sand or ashes on the walks or anything—so on toward Walnut Street. “So you’re in the leather business with Mr. Gridley,” the girl observed. “No! I was in the leather business with Mr. Gridley. Now I’m in the paper-box business with my father.” Miss Gardner observed that it must be an awful interesting business. Nathan observed, Oh, he didn’t know; sometimes it was and then again, sometimes it wasn’t. “And what position in the business do you occupy?” the girl asked next. “Oh, I run the place,” Nathan told her with a careless gesture, as though running places was the most inconsequential and offhand job in the world; undoubtedly he could run places before breakfast or between meals or in his sleep. So Miss Gardner was left to infer. “Very interesting!” the girl commented. “And how many employees have you in your factory?” Nathan was suddenly ashamed of his factory, the size of it. Oh, to be able to describe it in hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands!