“Grandma,” he said desperately;—“I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you talk this way about the sweetest, the most perfect, the loveliest——” “Get rid of her!” she cried. And as the distressed young man went out into the hall she leaned forward in her chair, shaking at him a piteously bent and emaciated forefinger. “You get rid of her, if you don’t want to die in the gutter! Get rid of her!” CHAPTER V DAN walked home from his grandmother’s with the wind blowing a fine snow against his chest, within which something seemed to be displaced and painful. Higher up, under the cold sleek band of his tall hat, there was a stricken puzzlement; and no doubt he was in hard case. For a young lover rebuffed upon speaking of his sweetheart is like a fine artist who has made some fragile, exquisite thing and offers it confidently in tender pride, only to see it buffeted and misprized. To Dan it seemed as though Lena herself had been injuriously mishandled, whereas the injury fell really upon something much more delicate; the lovely image he had made for himself and thought was Lena—an angelic substance most different from the substance of that “little brunette” herself. He told himself that his grandmother had increased in unreasonableness with increasing age, but in spite of all efforts to reassure himself, and notwithstanding her prediction that he would receive a foolish support from his parents in the matter of his engagement, it was decidedly without jauntiness that he made his announcement to them after dinner that evening. He found them in the library, a shadowy big room where the fire of soft coal twinkled again upon polished dark woodwork, upon the clear glass doors of the bookcases, and touched with rose the eye-glasses and the shining oval façade of Harlan’s shirt as he sat reading Suetonius under a tall lamp in the bay window. Harlan, unlike his father and his brother, always “dressed” for dinner. He was the thinner and perhaps an inch the shorter of the two brothers; but in spite of their actual likeness of contour, people who knew them most intimately sometimes maintained that there was not even an outward resemblance, so sharp was the contrast in manner and expression. It was Martha Shelby who said that if Harlan had been a year shipwrecked and naked on a savage isle he would still look fastidious and wear “that same old ‘How-vulgar-everything-seems-to-be!’ expression.” Tramps approaching Harlan on the street to beg a dime from him usually decided at the last moment to pass on in philosophic silence.