You held up your hand warningly. “When the nature of dolls is too deeply questioned into, they are found to contain only sawdust.” “And we often open the oyster, to find sometimes a pearl.” “The result of a morbid condition,” you laughed back. “Better disease and a pearl than health without it.” “But suppose one incapable of the ailment? Should one be blamed if no pearl forms?” “An Eastern poet said:— Diving and finding no pearl in the sea, Blame not the ocean,—the fault is in thee. Have you ever tried to find a pearl, Miss Walton?” You hesitated a moment. “Like the Englishman’s view of the conundrum,” you finally parried archly, “that would be a good joke if there only wasn’t something to ‘guess’ in it.” “Do you know what Maizie is talking about?” demanded Mrs. Blodgett discontentedly. “Better than Miss Walton does herself, I think,” I averred. You had started to go, but again you turned, and asked with interest, “What _do_ I mean?” “That you believe what you think you don’t.” You stood looking at me for a moment. “We are becoming friends, Dr. Hartzmann,” you affirmed, and passed through the window. Good-night, dear friend. XIX _March 10._ For the remainder of my visit, it seemed as if your prophecy of friendship were to be fulfilled. From the moment of my confidence to you, all the reserves that had been raised by my slighting of your invitations disappeared, perhaps because the secret I had shared with you served to make my past conduct less unreasonable; still more, I believe, because of the faith in you it evidenced in me. Certain I am that in the following week I felt able to be my true self when with you, for the first time since we were boy and girl together. The difference was so marked that you commented on the change. “Do you remember,” you asked me, “our conversation in Mr. Whitely’s study, when I spoke of how little people really knew one another? Here we have been meeting for over three years, and yet I find that I haven’t in the least known you.” It is a pleasure to me to recall that whole conversation, for it was by far the most intimate that we ever had,—so personal that I think I should but have had to question to learn what I long to know. In response to my slight assistance, to the sympathy I had shown, you opened for the moment your heart; willing, apparently, that I should fathom your true nature.