"We had expected opium-fiends, like the melodramas they used to have on Fourteenth Street, before the movies came. But we had a disgustingly clean table, with a mad, reckless picture worked in silk, showing two doves and a boiled lotos flower, hanging near us, to intimidate us. The waiter was a Harvard graduate, I know--perhaps Oxford--and he said, 'May I sugges' ladies velly nize China dinner?' He suggested chow-main--we thought it would be either birds' nests or rats' tails, and it was simply crisp noodles with the most innocuous sauce.... And the people! They were all stupid tourists like ourselves, except for a Jap, with his cunnin' Sunday tie, and his little trousers all so politely pressed, and his clean pocket-hanky. And he was reading _The Presbyterian_!... Then we came up here, and it doesn't seem so very primitive here, either. It's most aggravating.... It seems to me I've been telling you an incredible lot about our silly adventures--you're probably the man who won the Indianapolis motor-race or discovered electricity or something." Through her narrative, her eyes had held his, but now she glanced about, noted Olive, and seemed uneasy. "I'm afraid I'm nothing so interesting," he said; "but I have wanted to see new places and new things--and I've more or less seen 'em. When I've got tired of one town, I've simply up and beat it, and when I got there--wherever there was--I've looked for a job. And----Well, I haven't lost anything by it." "Have you really? That's the most wonderful thing to do in the world. My travels have been Cook's tours, with our own little Thomas Cook _and_ Son right in the family--I've never even had the mad freedom of choosing between a tour of the Irish bogs and an educational pilgrimage to the shrines of celebrated brewers. My people have always chosen for me. But I've wanted----One doesn't merely _go_ without having an objective, or an excuse for going, I suppose." "I do," declared Carl. "But----May I be honest?" "Yes." Intimacy was about them. They were two travelers from a far land, come together in the midst of strangers. "I speak of myself as globe-trotting," said Carl. "I have been. But for a good many weeks I've been here in New York, knowing scarcely any one, and restless, yet I haven't felt like hiking off, because I was sick for a time, and because a chap that was going to Brazil with me died suddenly." "To Brazil? Exploring?" "Yes--just a stab at it, pure amateur.... I'm not at all sure I'm just making-believe when I speak of blue bowls and so on. Tell me. In the West, one would speak of 'seeing the girls home.' How would one say that gracefully in New-Yorkese, so that I might have the chance to beguile Miss Olive Dunleavy and Miss Ruth Winslow into letting me see them home?" "Really, we're not a bit afraid to go home alone." "I won't tease, but----May I come to your house for tea, some time?" She hesitated. It came out with a rush. "Yes. Do come up. N-next Sunday, if you'd like."