"Yes, I had needed you all right!" And Ardmore sniffed dolefully, and complained of the smoke that was drifting in upon them from the train sheds. "I wish you wouldn't always be leaving me. You ought to give up your job and amuse me. You're the only chap I know who doesn't talk horse or automobile or yacht, or who doesn't want to spend whole evenings discussing champagne vintages; but you're too good a man to be wasted on a college professorship. Better let me endow an institution that will make you president--there might be something in that." "It would make me too prominent, so that when we really make up our minds to go in for adventures I should be embarrassed by my high position. As a mere lecturer on _The Libeling of Sunken Ships_ in a law school, I'm the most obscure person in the world. And for another thing, we couldn't risk the scandal of tainted money. It would be nasty to have your great-grandfather's whisky deals with the Mohawk Indians chanted in a college yell." The crowd surged past them to the Washington express, and a waiting porter picked up Griswold's bags. "Wish you wouldn't go. I have three hours to wait," said Ardmore, looking at his watch, "and the only Atlanta man I know is out of town." "What did you say you were going to New Orleans for?" demanded Griswold, taking out his ticket and moving toward the gate. "I thought you exhausted the Creole restaurants long ago." "The fact is," faltered Ardmore, coloring, "I'm looking for some one." "Out with it--out with it!" commanded his friend. "I'm looking for a girl I saw from a car window day before yesterday. I had started north, and my train stopped to let a south-bound train pass somewhere in North Carolina. The girl was on the south-bound sleeper, and her window was opposite mine. She put aside the magazine she was reading and looked me over rather coolly." "And you glanced carelessly in the opposite direction and pulled down your shade, of course, like the well-bred man you are--" interrupted Griswold, holding fast to Ardmore's arm as they walked down the platform. "I did no such thing. I looked at her and she looked at me. And then my train started--" "Well, trains have a way of starting. Does the romance end here?" "Then, just at the last moment, she winked at me!" "It was a cinder, Ardy. The use of soft coal on railways is one of the saddest facts of American transportation. I need hardly remind you, Mr. Ardmore, that nice girls don't wink at strange young men. It isn't done!" "I would have you know, Professor, that this girl is a lady."