But that was after I had been foolish enough to try to make her see my point of view toward life, and failed. Before that she had been sympathetic. Our first conversation had been over the telephone, when I had called up Clotilde’s to ask if Miss Blair had returned from Boston. "Miss Blair at the ’phone," was the reply. "Who’s this?" Somewhat timidly I said I was Mr. Harrowby, repeating the name twice before she recognized it as mine. Having invited her to dine with me and go to the theater I got a quavering, "Sure!" which lacked her usual spontaneity. "You don’t seem pleased," I said. "Oh, I’m pleased enough. I’m only wondering if—if you are." "Why shouldn’t I be, when I’ve asked you?" "Well, I put my foot in it for fair, didn’t I?" "You mean in Boston? Oh, that was all right. I know you meant to do me a good turn; and perhaps you’ve done it." "Oh, I _meant_ to; but I sure did get a lesson. My mother used to tell me to keep my fingers out of other people’s pies; and I’m going to from this time on." In the evening, seated opposite me at the little table at Josephine’s, with the din of a hundred diners giving us a sort of privacy, she told me more about it. "You see, it was this way: He’d always been talking to me about this rich young Boston widow he’d met at Palm Beach, trying to get my mad up." "What did he say of her?" "Well, the sort of thing he _would_ say. He’s a good judge of a woman, you must admit; and he thought she was about the classiest. It was when I began to tell him what I wanted to be that he sprang that on me, said she was the model for me to study, and that when it came to the dressy vampire Agnes Dunham wasn’t in it. "Did he call this—this Boston lady a dressy vampire?" "Oh, he didn’t mean that. It was only that for any one who wanted to be a dressy vampire she was a smart style. A vampire mustn’t look a vampire, or she might as well go out of business. The one thing I criticized in Agnes Dunham in ’The Scarlet Sin’ was that a woman who advertised herself so much as an adventuress wouldn’t get very far with her adventuring." "I see. You’d go in for a finer art." "I’d go in for pulling the thing off, whatever it was; but that’s not what I want to tell you. To go back to what he was always saying about this Boston lady, it made me crazy to see her. In the corset business I’d got intimate with a good many society women, and most of them were gumps. For one good vampire there were a hundred with the kick of a boiled potato. That made me all the crazier to see, and I thought about it and thought about it. Then, one day, Harry called me on the ’phone to say— fxsYou see, he’s living with the Averills, and when that Mrs. Mountney— Well, when he told me who you were, and that the lady wasn’t a widow any more than I am, well, I simply laid down and passed away. To think that _you_, the fellow we’d been putting down as a mystery and a swell crook—"