Then somebody discovered a way to the roof, and nothing would do but every one must go climbing and scrambling gaily up a rickety old ladder to the fresh night air, where Hartley noticed that a number of the women were taking advantage of the gloom of the housetop to steal a quiet puff or two at a cigarette. And while he was noting this lamentable lapse from what was fit and proper somewhere in the half light behind him he heard a woman's voice say: "Mr. Repellier, won't you introduce me to that nice, big, clean-looking boy you have here?" There was a moment's silence, while Repellier seemed to be looking down at her. "If you promise not to break his heart, Miss Vaughan." A woman's low, quiet little laugh drifted softly through the night air. Hartley tried to look at the Great Bear, and not listen to more. "Here's my hand on it." Then the jesting voice grew suddenly serious. "But women's hearts never break nowadays, do they? They only wither." Hartley, who had grown hot and cold through his six feet of embarrassed bone and nerve, was dimly conscious the next minute of Repellier's leading over to him a slim-looking figure in yellow. Women accept the confusion of stalwart manhood, it has been said, as the profoundest tribute to their own power; and after Hartley had murmured something about the honor of meeting so eminent a novelist and in his honest embarrassment blurted out that he had often seen her name on the city ash-barrels, Cordelia Vaughan forgot her hazily indefinite yet deep-rooted hatred of everything English, and waited a moment for his next words. "They've dramatized a book of mine--that explains the ash-barrels," she explained deprecatively, seeing that he stood silent, laughing at her contempt of the ash-barrels. Hartley liked her the better for that touch of modesty. Her eyes had followed Repellier's retreating figure through the gloom. "Do you know, I always felt half afraid of Mr. Repellier, in some way? I wonder why it is?" "We always _are_ half afraid of great men; they're so apt to be rugged and lonely." "Yes, rugged and lonely, like lighthouses--but very useful." Hartley waited for her voice again. By moonlight all waters and all women may look the same, but Luna had no such leveling power, he knew, with voices. "He confessed to me you were the Hartley who wrote a study of slum life for Stetson's," the flute-like contralto was saying again. "Then you _do_ write?" The darkness of the night made it impossible for him to catch even the slightest outline of her face, but as he listened to her gloom-encompassed voice he wondered, in a sudden inner fury, just what she had meant by calling him clean-looking. He had a sense, nevertheless, of losing himself in the sweep of eddying breakers.