"All right. It wasn't bitterness; it was just whine. ... I'll go, now. You will comprehend, after you think it over, that there is at least nothing of impertinence in my loving you--only a blind unreason--a deadly fear lest the other man in me, suddenly revealed, vanish before I could understand him. Because when I saw you, life's meaning broke out suddenly--like a star--and that's another stale simile. But one has to climb very far before one can touch even the nearest of the stars.... So forgive my one lucid interval.... I shall probably never have another.... May I take you to your carriage?" "Mrs. Lannis is calling for me." "Then--I will take my leave--and the tatters of my reputation--any song can buy it, now----" "Mr. Quarren!" "Yes?" "I don't want you to go--like this. I want you to go away knowing in your heart that you have been very--nice--agreeable--to a young girl who hasn't perhaps had as much experience as you think----" "Thank God," he said, smiling. "I want you to like me, always," she said. "Will you?" "I promise," he replied so blithely that for a moment his light irony deceived her. Then something in his eyes left her silent, concerned, unresponsive--only her heart seemed to repeat persistently in childish reiteration, the endless question, Why? Why? Why? And she heard it but found no answer where love was not, and had never been. "I--am sorry," she said in a low voice. "I--I try to understand you--but I don't seem to.... I am so _very_ sorry that you--care for me." He took her gloved hand, and she let him. "I guess I'm nothing but a harlequin after all," he said, "and they're legitimate objects for pity. Good-bye, Mrs. Leeds. You've been very patient and sweet with a blithering lunatic.... I've committed only another harlequinade of a brand-new sort. But the fall from that balcony would have been less destructive." She looked at him out of her gray eyes. "One thing," she said, with a tremulous smile, "you may be certain that I am not going to forget you very easily." "Another thing," he said, "I shall never forget you as long as I live; and--you have my violets, I see. Are they to follow the gardenia?" "Only when their time comes," she said, trying to laugh. So he wished her a happy trip and sojourn in the South, and went away into the city--downtown, by the way to drop into an office chair in an empty office and listen to the click of a typewriter in the outer room, and sit there hour after hour with his chin in his hand staring at nothing out of the clear blue eyes of a boy. And she went away to her luncheon at the Province Club with Susanne Lannis who wished her to meet some of the governors--very grand ladies--upon whose good will depended Strelsa's election to the most aristocratic, comfortable, wisely managed, and thriftiest of all metropolitan clubs. After luncheon she, with Mrs. Lannis and Chrysos Lacy--a pretty red-haired edition of her brother--went to see "Sumurun."