"Well----! You are very good, Roger, to save your uncle a trip into the city to meet her. I must not impose upon you. But, a quiet hotel!" "Certainly, Aunt." "Phillida does not deserve pampering enjoyment. I am consenting for your sake." "Thank you, Aunt. I wonder, then, if you would mind if we stopped to see a show that I especially want to look over, for business reasons? We could come out on the theatre express; as we have done before, you remember?" "Yes, but----" "Thank you. I'll take good care of her. Good-bye." The receiver was still talking when I hung up. There is no other form of conversation so incomparably convenient. The train arrived within the half-hour. With the inrush of travelers, I sighted Phillida's sober young figure moving along the cement platform. She walked with dejection. Her gray suit represented a compromise between fashion and her mother's opinion of decorum, thus attaining a length and fulness not enough for grace yet too much for jauntiness. Her solemn gray hat was set too squarely upon the pale-brown hair, brushed back from her forehead. Her nice, young-girl's eyes looked out through a pair of shell-rimmed spectacles. She was too thin and too pale to content me. When she saw me coming toward her, her face brightened and colored quite warmly. She waved her bag with actual abandon and her lagging step quickened to a run. "Cousin Roger!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "Oh, how good of you to come!" She gripped my hands in a candid fervor of relief and pleasure. "I am so glad it is you," she insisted. "I was sorry the train could not be later; I wished, almost, it would never get in--and all the time it was you who were waiting for me!" "It was, and now you are about to share an orgy," I told her. "I have your mother's permission to take you to dinner, Miss Knox." "Here? In town? Just us?" "Yes. And afterward we will take in any show you fancy. How does that strike you?" She gazed up at me, absorbing the idea and my seriousness. To my dismay, she grew pale again. "I--I really believe it will keep me from just dying." I pretended to think that a joke. But I recognized that my little cousin was on the sloping way toward a nervous breakdown. "No baggage?" I observed. "Good! I hope you did not eat too much luncheon. This will be an early dinner." She waited to take off the spectacles and put them in her little bag. "I do not need them except to study, but I didn't dare meet Mother without them," she explained. "No; I could not eat lunch, or breakfast either, Cousin Roger. Nor much dinner last night! Oh, if you knew how I dread--the grind! I should rather run away." "So we will; for this evening." "Yes. Where--where were you going to take me?"