"Can't you steal an hour or two and run away from all this dust and rattle and noise down here?" she asked, bending over him with her tremulously wistful smile. He hesitated. "Do come, the air is so beautiful. You look worried and tired, and it'll do you so much good. Do come!" Still Hartley hesitated. He asked himself why it was he always hesitated before this particular young woman. Then he looked at her again, and did not stop to answer to that inner questioning voice. The next moment he was sitting beside her and the carriage was bowling lightly across the strong sunlight of Washington Square and out under the arch, where the long undulating vista of Fifth Avenue melted into the distance. As they passed an old studio building on the lower avenue she pointed to one of its highest little windows. "That's where I used to live," she said simply, and then an involuntary sigh escaped her. "How soon we change, without knowing it!" she added. "How?" said Hartley looking back at the window. "Oh, we get hard and selfish and careless." There was a new note of tenderness in her voice when next she spoke. "I wish I could learn to love children and flowers more than I do. Haven't you ever felt that you'd like to be able to give and suffer and endure? That you'd like to throw something out of yourself? Well, that's how I feel sometimes when I think how people--I mean people with ambitions--have to live for themselves. But it can't always be helped." He looked at her--it was a new facet to the stone. "For instance, this very afternoon," she went on. "You know I've always wanted to bring my poor old father up to New York to be near me. He's so alone in the world--there's only him and old Mammy Dinah at home now; and week by week I've been putting off seeing about the little apartment I'm leasing for them. I promised to have it settled this afternoon, but at two I have to be at the rehearsal of that great drama they're making out of The Silver Poppy; at four I have to be interviewed for a Sunday paper; at five I have a tea and two receptions; and to-night we dine at the Carringtons." "Let's see about the flat--is it a flat? Now, together," suggested Hartley, with a sudden impulse to share in her mood of passing softness. She looked at him keenly for a moment or two as he told her he would like to feel that he was doing something for her father; the fleeting shadow of a fear crossed her face. "No," she said, "let's have our morning together in the Park."