"I like animals," he told her on one such occasion, "and the--the country. I guess that's what I am, a country boy. I sure would like to own a ranch." He'd not pressed her so eagerly for her hopes. Scarcely. His singleness of interest at least was wholly masculine. But that didn't deter her. She found herself giving them to him just the same, just as eagerly. "A ranch!" she seized hungrily upon that word. "A home! A white house on a hill with light green shutters. The house, of course, not the hill." She went further. "And a white and blue kitchen." Her haste to tell him was bubbling. "With aluminum pots and pans. Dozens! A whole set!" And, somehow subdued: "They're very expensive." Broadway never knew anything about that courtship. But Felicity used to wake up, now and then, and hear the other girl crying softly in the night. It was a long bad period for Cecille. At first the birth of this wholly new thing within her baffled her own power to reason. She watched its mushroom growth with fascination, just a little aghast. But when, all in a kind of cataclysmic flash, she thought to recognize it for what it was, she shrank away as if from a malignant fungus. From the first evening one thing had intrigued her. Her discovery that the sensation of pervading cleanliness which she always had from him was not a result of the careful clothes he wore but something more essential made her remember how the Sunday-groomed louts of other days, reeking with cheap toilet water and hair oil, had filled her with dull loathing. She had never attempted an analysis of that distaste. Now trying to analyze its opposite, in the case of Perry Blair, she arrived at a disquieting certainty. She found she could no more be near him, no more glance at him, without being conscious of him physically, than she could strike her head against a wall and not be hurt. She realized more. She realized how keenly she liked being near him. She realized how often, and for how long, she had been making little opportunities to stand close, so that her shoulder brushed his. How often she had contrived a fleeting contact of their hands. And yet if anybody had tried to tell her that this was the blooming of a perfect thing to be cherished all her days she would have suffered unutterably that she had been found out. As it was she suffered sufficiently. She cried too often into her pillow. But she wasn't yet wholly debased in her own eyes. That came directly, inevitably. One Saturday afternoon, urged more enthusiastically by him than she had ever been urged before, she accompanied him to a gymnasium far uptown.