But women have their little reserves. The lovely time to which I had reference was a mountain storm I once survived, on Craggy, six thousand feet above sea level, separated from my party, having followed a cattle path by mistake, and—_alone_. This time was just as lovely as that. Then, after a terrified scurrying here and there, I had gone back to the mountain top to wait. Out of what had seemed an innocent sky an electric storm broke. Lashing his steeds with whips of fire, Apollo drove them across the boiling heavens. At each ear-crashing report of thunder the earth threatened to crumble, hurling me down through bottomless space. With the sharp hissings of snakes the lightning fell about me. Rain-drenched, storm-torn, but too terrified to brave the electric fires darting across the mountain’s top to what seemed safety under the big rock where a flock of frightened sheep huddled, I took the storm in the open. When it had rolled away the sheep no longer huddled—I was indeed alone—they lay still. “Does it meet your approval?” Mr. Elliott put the direct question to me, and somehow I knew it had been asked before. I looked down at my plate helplessly—we had reached the salad course—I tried to rouse my laggard brain. Approval of what, and what was approval? “It gets my goat!” The words came from my lips. My ears heard them. And the fright of the foolish words cleared my brain. “What!” There was astonishment, there was amusement, there was also a puzzled intentness in the eyes that looked into mine, and I stammered that the girl who sat at the next table—the girl who looked so cultured and smartly got up—had just said it, and that it was new to me, but it sounded like an idiom of the street. With that careless, satiated New York glance Mr. Elliott’s eyes swept the girl. “Beef to the heel,” he said heartlessly. “Beef to the heel!” That puzzled me, too. We had drained our coffee cups when two people who sat at a table behind us passed—a man and a woman—Bobby Haralson and Dicky. I recognized Bobby as I came in; the lovely droop of Dicky’s back is not unfamiliar to me, either. “That’s Bob Haralson—you’ve heard of him—one of our biggest men, and his biggest work is still in him. He’s the nicest, most lovable, queerest fellow you ever did see. He has hosts of friends, but mostly, he lives to himself. He’d give his last dollar to a friend and go hungry himself; and once I knew him to refuse to be introduced to a rich fellow of power in the literary world because that man belonged soul and body to a corporation—had been bought. That’s Bob Haralson! I often see him here, but I never saw him here with a woman before. Come to think of it, I never saw him anywhere before with a woman—not much in his line, women. But they seemed to be having a corking time. I never saw him so animated. That little witch—pretty, wasn’t she?—has got him going. I’d have asked him over to be introduced had he been alone.”