The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys--"Gladys what?" he wondered--let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and uncomfortable minority. "To-day is only my second time," she said to him, with a kind of appealing protest; "you mustn't watch me and criticise me." She had just finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for consolation and reassurance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. "When was the first?" "Why, don't you know? The day you--you--" "Oh, _that_ day!" laughed Truesdale. "I didn't know you were there, of course. You must have thought me absurd." "No; not--not--absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many handsome houses all around--" Truesdale smiled. "Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it." To him this thoroughfare was not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the dominant note of all American street architecture. "But let her admire it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!" "I enjoy driving down it so much," she continued, confidentially, yet with a shy little look as if trying to learn whether her confidence was misplaced. "Aunt Lydia and I go shopping almost every day." "Ten kilometres down and back," estimated Truesdale; "ten kilometres of luxury and grandeur--don't let it overpower you. And you are learning where the shops are, I suppose, and the theatres, and the post-office, perhaps, and the hotels, and what all besides." "No," said Bertie Patterson, proudly; "I knew all that before I came. There are books, you know--and maps. I studied them at home beforehand." Truesdale had never seen any of the books, but he thought their existence probable enough. He remembered, to, his own maps--how he had become familiar with the London clubs long before walking through Pall Mall, and how he knew where to find all the Paris theatres years previous to his first stroll along the Boulevard. "And you have been to all the high places, I suppose?" "I've been to the top of the Masonic Temple." "And to the places were they have the sun-dials, and the gates ajar, and the American flag made of--of--Heaven knows what?" "The parks? Yes, we have been to one or two of them, but we were a little late for all those lovely things; most of them had been dug up."