When all were served he grew abstracted as he ate, and Saxton appealed to his hostess, as one college graduate may appeal to another, along the line of their college experiences. They had, it appeared, several acquaintances in common, and Saxon recalled that some of his classmates had often visited the college in which Miss Porter had been a student; and a little of the old ache crept into his heart as he remembered the ways in which the social side of college life had meant so much less to him than to most of the men he knew; but as she talked freely of her own experience, he found that her humor was contagious, and he even fell so far under its spell as to recount anecdotes of his own student life in which his part had not been heroic. Porter came back occasionally from the land of his commercial dreams, and they all laughed together at the climaxes. He presently directed the talk to the cattle business. "You'd better get Mr. Saxton to tell you how much fun ranching is," he said, turning to the boy, who at once became interested in Saxton. "I'm going to be a ranchman," the lad declared. "Father's going to buy me the Poindexter ranch some day." "That's one of Mr. Saxton's properties. Maybe he'd trade it to you for a tin whistle." "Is it as bad as that?" asked Saxton. "Just wait until you see it. It's pretty bad." "The house must have been charming," said Miss Porter. "And that's about all it was," replied her father. The dinner ended with a salad. This was not an incident but an event. The highest note of civilization is struck when a salad is dressed by a master of the chemistry of gastronomy. The clumsy and unworthy hesitate in the performance of this sacred rite, and are never sure of their proportions; the oil refuses intimacy with the vinegar, and sulks and selfishly creates little yellow isles for itself in the estranging sea of acid. The salt becomes indissoluble and the paprika is irrecoverable flotsam. The clove of garlic, always recalcitrant under clumsy handling, refuses to impart the merest hint of its wild tang, but the visible and tangible world reeks with it. It was a joy to John Saxton to see the deftness with which Evelyn Porter performed her miracle; he did not know much about girls, but he surmised that a girl who composed a salad dressing with such certainty did many things gracefully and well. There were no false starts, no "ohs" of regret and appeal, no questions of quantity. The light struck goldenly on the result as she poured it finally upon the crisply-curling lettuce leaves which showed discreetly over the edge of a deep Doulton bowl. It seemed to him high treason that his host should decline the dressing thus produced by an art which realized the dreams of alchemy, and should pour vinegar from the cruet with his own hand upon the helpless leaves.