"It has been sweet. I won't croak any more." "There's the train coming." CHAPTER XXXVIII While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires. Carl tried to bring her coolness. He ate only poached eggs on toast or soup and salad for dinner, that he might not be torpid. He gave her moss-roses with drops of water like dew on the stems. They sat out on the box-stoop--the unfriendly New York street adopting for a time the frank neighborliness of a village--and exclaimed over every breeze. They talked about the charm of forty degrees below zero. That is, sometimes. Their favorite topic was themselves. She still insisted that she was not in love with him; hooted at the idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into warm slumber in the familiarity of his arms. Yet he dared not kiss her throat, as he had done at Long Beach. As lovers do, Carl had thought intently of her warning that she did care for clothes, dancing, country clubs. Ruth would have been caressingly surprised had she known the thought and worried conscientiousness he gave to the problem of planning "parties" for her. Ideas were always popping up in the midst of his work, and never giving him rest till he had noted them down on memo.-papers. He carried about, on the backs of envelopes, such notes as these: Join country clb take R dances there? Basket of fruit for R Invite Mason W lunch Orgnze Tcar tour NY to SF Newspaper men on tour probly Forbes Rem Walter's new altitude 16,954 R to Astor Roof Rem country c He did get a card to the Peace Waters Country Club and take Ruth to a dance there. She seemed to know every other member, and danced eloquently. He took her to the Josiah Bagbys' for dinner; to the first-night of a summer musical comedy. But he was still the stranger in New York, and "parties" are not to be had by tipping waiters and buying tickets. Half of the half-dozen affairs which they attended were of her inspiration; he was invited to go yachting at Larchmont, motoring, swimming on Long Island, with friends of herself and her brothers.