Mrs. Willing was twenty-four, handsome, expensive, lively, and intensely fond of what she thought was pleasure. Willing was thirty-two, and had a close-clipped mustache: there were ten thousand men in New York whom you might have mistaken for him at twenty paces. He was assistant something on a nineteenth story downtown, and his scale of living continually crowded his income to the wall. The Willings--there were, of course, but two of them--had the kind of home which farmers' daughters so envy the heroines of "society" novels. They lived in a showy apartment hotel in the West Fifties, kept a motor-car, and went out for dinner. In fact "out" was the favorite word in the establishment: the Willings did everything but sleep "out." "I can't bear to stick at home," said Mrs. Willing to Carlisle. "I've always _loved_ to go places." And places they went from one end of Carlisle's visit to the other. The shops in the morning, downtown on a rush to lunch with Willing, back to Broadway for a matinee, back home at the double-quick to dress for dinner, to the theatre after dinner, to supper after the theatre. There was always hurry; there was never quite time to reach any of the places at the hour agreed. "That's the fun!" said Florrie Willing. "Rush, rush, rush from morning to night. That's little old New York in a nutshell." Carlisle had expected to be thoroughly diverted by the rattle, bang, and glitter in which the Willings lived, but in this she was only partially gratified. Pure restlessness, it seemed, had entered her blood: she was no sooner fairly settled in the Wrexham than she began to wish herself back home again. The vague thought pursued her, even at the places, that she was missing something; that she had stepped aside from, not into, the real current of her life. Dazzling indeed were some of the dining-places to which the experienced Willings took their guest, but somehow none of them seemed so really interesting, after all, as home. What was happening away off there on Washington Street? Suppose Mr. Canning should return ahead of time for his farewell visit--return and find her not there?... "You're changed somehow, Cally," cried Florrie Willing, on the third or fourth day--"I can't just put my little patty on it, but I can see it all the same." They had just rushed up from breakfast, which the Willings took in the apartment café, and were now dressing furiously to go shopping. Cally, surprised with her mouth full of hatpins, said of course she had; she was getting frightfully old. "You never used to rest a cheek on a pensive hand, and stare five minutes at a time into eternity. Out with it!" said Florrie. "You're disappointed in love." "That's it, too. I loved a tall pretty soldier, and he rode away." "_We'll_ never ride away, at this rate. Get a _move_ on, Cally! We've slews and slews of places to go to." Cally, who considered that she already had a move on, did her best to get on another one.