They strolled along for several blocks before discovering, in the purlieus of Tyler Street, a dingy "ice-cream parlor," eminently fitted for interviews with the Lilys of the locality. At a marble-topped table, translucent with years of ice-cream rendezvous, they waited for his order to be filled, and she saw the amused honesty of his face and he saw the good nature of hers; which made him think again of Eleanor's wish to help her. He urged some indifferent cake upon her, and joked about how many saucers of ice cream they could consume between them; then he became serious: Why didn't she drop Batty? "Oh," she said, "if I only _could_ drop him! I hate him. He's the first friend I've had." "Was he really the--the first?" Maurice said. His question was the old human interest of playing with fire, but he supposed that it was a desire to raise the fallen. "Well, except ... there was a man; I expected to marry _him_. Then Batty, he come along." "I see," said Maurice. "Where's the first man?" "_I_ don't know. I was only sixteen." "Damn him!" Maurice said, sympathetically. He was so moved that he ordered more ice cream; then it occurred to him that he ought to let her know that he was entirely a philanthropist. "My wife and I'll help you," he said. "Oh ... you're _married_? You're real young!" she commented. "I'm no chicken. My wife and I think exactly alike about these things. Of course she's not a prude. She understands life, just as I do. And she'd love to be a real friend to you. She'll put you on your feet, and think none the worse of you. Tell me about yourself," he urged, intimately; he felt some deep satisfaction stir within him, which he supposed was his recognition of a moral purpose. But she drew back into her own reserves. "They always ask that," she thought; and the momentary reality she had shown hardened into the easy lying of her business: she told this or that--the cruel father of fiction, who tried to drive her into marriage with the rich old man; the wicked lover who destroyed trusting innocence; the inevitable _facilis descensus_--Batty at last. And now the ice-cream parlor in this dirty street, with the clear-eyed, handsome, amused young man, who had forgotten his own anger in the impulse, so frequent in the very young and very upright man, to "save" some little creature of the gutter! As for Maurice, he said to himself, "She's a sweet little thing; and not really bad." He was right there: Lily was not bad; she was as far from sin as she was from virtue--just a little, unmoral, very amiable animal.