"So I stayed," he said to Boots with an enthusiasm quite boyish, "and I had a perfectly bully time. She's just as clever as she can be--startling at moments. I never half appreciated her--she formerly appealed to me in a different way--a young girl knocking at the door of the world, and no mother or father to open for her and show her the gimcracks and the freaks and the side-shows. Do you know, Boots, that some day that girl is going to marry somebody, and it worries me, knowing men as I do--unless you should think of--" "Great James!" faltered Mr. Lansing, "are you turning into a schatschen? Are you planning to waddle through the world making matches for your friends? If you are I'm quitting you right here." "It's only because you are the decentest man I happen to know," said Selwyn resentfully. "Probably she'd turn you down, anyway. But--" and he brightened up, "I dare say she'll choose the best to be had; it's a pity though--" "What's a pity?" "That a charming, intellectual, sensitive, innocent girl like that should be turned over to a plain lump of a man." "When you've finished your eulogy on our sex," said Lansing, "I'll walk home with you." "Come on, then; I can talk while I walk; did you think I couldn't?" And as they struck through the first cross street toward Lexington Avenue: "It's a privilege for a fellow to know that sort of a girl--so many surprises in her--the charmingly unexpected and unsuspected!--the pretty flashes of wit, the naive egotism which is as amusing as it is harmless. . . . I had no idea how complex she is. . . . If you think you have the simple feminine on your hands--forget it, Boots!--for she's as evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight. . . . And here I've been doing the benevolent prig, bestowing society upon her as a man doles out indigestible stuff to a kid, using a sort of guilty discrimination in the distribution--" "What on earth is all this?" demanded Lansing; "are you perhaps _non compos_, dear friend?" "I'm trying to tell you and explain to myself that little Miss Erroll is a rare and profoundly interesting specimen of a genus not usually too amusing," he replied with growing enthusiasm. "Of course, Holly Erroll was her father, and that accounts for something; and her mother seems to have been a wit as well as a beauty--which helps you to understand; but the brilliancy of the result--aged nineteen, mind you--is out of all proportion; cause and effect do not balance. . . . Why, Boots, an ordinary man--I mean an everyday fellow who dines and dances and does the harmlessly usual about town, dwindles to anaemic insignificance when compared to that young girl--even now when she's practically undeveloped--when her intelligence is like an uncut gem still in the matrix of inexperience--"