Again the knowledge of her mother's mother's mother blazed red-hot in the Girl's cheeks. "Y--e--s," she faltered reluctantly, "the trout-fishing is very generous in May." "Will Peter be there?" persisted the Journalist. Her eyes began to shine again with amusement. "Oh, no," she said. "Peter never comes until July." With mock dignity she straightened herself up till her shoulder almost reached the Journalist's. "I was very foolish," she attested, "even to mention Peter, or mankind--at all. Of course, I'm commencing to realize that my ideas about men are exceedingly countrified--'disgustingly countrified,' my aunt tells me. Why, just this last week at my aunt's sewing club I learned that the only two real qualifications for marriage are that a man should earn not less than a hundred dollars a week, and be a perfectly kind hooker." "A perfectly kind hooker?" queried the Journalist. "Why, yes," she said. "Don't you know--now--that all our dresses fasten in the back?" Her little tinkling, giggling laugh rang out with startling incongruity through the formal room, and her uncle glanced at her and frowned with the slightest perceptible flicker of irritation. She leaned her face a wee bit closer to the Journalist. "Now, uncle, for instance," she confided, "is not a particularly kind hooker. He's accurate, you understand, but not exactly kind." The Journalist started to smile, but instantly her tip-most finger ends brushed across his sleeve. "Oh, please, don't smile any more," she pleaded, "because every time you smile you look so pleasant that some lady sticks out a remark like a hand and grabs you into her own conversation." But the warning came too late. In another moment the Journalist was most horridly involved with the people on his left in a prosy discussion regarding Japanese servants. For another interminable length of time the Woodland Girl sat in absolute isolation. Some of the funerals at home were vastly more social, she thought--people at least inquired after the health of the survivors. But now, even after she had shredded all her lettuce into a hundred pieces and bitten each piece twice, she was still quite alone. Even after she had surreptitiously nibbled up all the cracker crumbs around her own plate and the Journalist's plate, she was still quite alone. Finally, in complete despair, she folded her little, brown, ringless hands and sat and stared frankly about her.