"I dare say they do, for unfortunately many people are fools. But I am bent upon adventure. It has dawned upon me that every day has its possibilities, that the right turn at any corner may bring me face to face with the most stirring encounters. My age protects me where youth must timidly turn back. My physician pronounces me good for ten years more of active life, and I intend to keep amused. If I were a young man like you, I should crawl through chimneys no more, but take to the open road. I resent the harsh clang of these meaningless years. As I walked among the hills that lie behind the Manor this morning I heard the bugles calling. Out there in the Avenue at this hour there are miles of fat dowagers in padded broughams who think of nothing but clothes and food. And speaking of food," she continued, with a droll turn, "I am convinced that the caviare in that sandwich was never nearer Russia than Casco Bay." She drew out her watch, and noting the hour, concluded:-- "Clearly we have much in common. I should like to ask you further as to your unusual profession, but errands summon me elsewhere. However, something tells me we shall meet again." She rose in her swift bird-like fashion and passed lightly down the room and through the door. She had left a dollar beside her plate to pay her check, which I noted called for only forty cents. I glanced at the cashier's desk. The aureoled head had not reappeared; but immediately I heard a voice murmuring beside me. I had believed myself alone, and in my surprise I thought some wizardry had made audible one of the verses on the wall. "What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture"-- It was she whose aureoled head I had marked earlier in the receipt of custom, the girl who had vanished as Miss Hollister appeared. She wore the snowy vestments of the other attending vestals, with the difference that the cap that crowned the waitresses was omitted in her case. This I took to be the Asolando's tribute to her adorable head, which clearly did not need the electric light or other adventitious aid to invoke its lovely glow. The line she had spoken hung goldenly upon the air. She was not tall, and her eyes, I saw, were brown. She had clearly not climbed far the stairway of her years, but her serenity was the least bit disconcerting. "Pardon me," I began, "but I am an ignorant Philistine, and cannot cap the verse you have quoted." "There is no reason why you should do so. It is the rule of the Asolando that we shall attract the attention of customers when necessary by speaking a line of verse. We are not allowed to open a conversation, no matter how imperative, with 'Listen,' or the even more vulgar 'Say.'" "A capital idea, of which I heartily approve, but now that I am a waiting auditor, eager"--