"Of course it did. You've guessed my secret. I'm the Spirit of Spring. Last Wednesday, when I lost my marquise ring, I was the spirit of vitriol, but now----I'm a poet. I've thought it all out and decided that I shall be the American Sappho. At any moment I am quite likely to rush madly across the pavement and sit down on the curb and indite several stanzas on the back of a calling-card, while the crowd galumps around me in an awed ring.... I feel like kidnapping you and making you take me aeroplaning, but I'll compromise. You're to buy me a book and take me down to the Maison Épinay for tea, and read me poetry while I yearn over the window-boxes and try to look like Nicollette. Buy me a book with spring in it, and a princess, and a sky like this--cornflower blue with bunny-rabbit clouds." At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty débutantes in pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes. "I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless but made of the very best materials," said Carl. "They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern costumes! They're charming!" "Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun, and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze tasted of spring. Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills of the Metropolitan Tower. "I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir, of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl, be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of Arcadia. Go ask him." "Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you." "He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play games with them."