glance over his form. Kirk eyed her apprehensively. The finger darted
forward and struck home in the region of the third waistcoat button.
"Wonderful!" she exclaimed. "Ruth!"
"Yes, aunt."
"Prod Mr. Winfield where my finger is pointing. He is extraordinarily
muscular."
"I say, really!" protested Kirk. He was a modest young man, and this
exploration of his more intimate anatomy by the finger-tips of the girl
he loved was not to be contemplated.
"Just as you please," said Mrs. Porter. "If I were a man of your
physique, I should be proud of it."
"Wouldn't you like to go up and see George?" asked Kirk. It was hard on
George, but it was imperative that this woman be removed somehow.
"Very well. I have brought him a little book to read, which will do him
good. It is called 'Elementary Rules for the Preservation of the
Body'."
"He has learned one of them, all right, since yesterday," said Kirk.
"Not to walk about in front of automobiles."
"The rules I refer to are mainly concerned with diet and wholesome
exercise," explained Mrs. Porter. "Careful attention to them may yet
save him. His case is not hopeless. Ruth, let Mr. Winfield show you his
pictures. They are poor in many respects, but not entirely without
merit."
Ruth, meanwhile, had been sitting on the couch, listening to the
conversation without really hearing it. She was in a dreamy, contented
mood. She found herself curiously soothed by the atmosphere of the
studio, with its shaded lights and its atmosphere of peace. That was
the keynote of the place, peace.
From outside came the rumble of an elevated train, subdued and
softened, like faintly heard thunder. Somebody passed the window,
whistling. A barrier seemed to separate her from these noises of the
city. New York was very far away.
"I believe I could be wonderfully happy in a place like this," she
thought.
She became suddenly aware, in the midst of her meditations, of eyes
watching her intently. She looked up and met Kirk's.
She could read the message in them as clearly as if he had spoken it,
and she was conscious of a little thrill of annoyance at the thought of
all the tiresome formalities which must be gone through before he could
speak it. They seemed absurd.
It was all so simple. He wanted her; she wanted him. She had known it
from the moment of their meeting. The man had found his woman, the
woman her man. Nature had settled the whole affair in an instant. And
now civilization, propriety, etiquette, whatever one cared to call it,
must needs step in with the rules and regulations and precedents.
The goal was there, clear in sight, but it must be reached by the
winding road appointed. She, being a woman and, by virtue of her sex,
primeval, scorned the road, and would have ignored it. But she knew
men, and especially, at that moment as their eyes met, she knew Kirk;
and she understood that to him the road was a thing that could not be
ignored. The mere idea of doing so would seem grotesque and impossible,
probably even shocking, to him. Men were odd, formal creatures, slaves
to precedent.
He must have time, it was the prerogative of the male; time to reveal
himself to her, to strut before her, to go through the solemn comedy of
proving to her, by the exhibition of his virtues and the careful
suppression of his defects, what had been clear to her from the first
instant, that here was her mate, the man nature had set apart for her.
He would begin by putting on a new suit of clothes and having his hair
cut.
She smiled. It was silly and tiresome, but it was funny.
"Will you show me your pictures, Mr. Winfield?" she asked.
"If you'd really care to see them. I'm afraid they're pretty bad."
"Exhibit A. Modesty," thought Ruth.
The journey had begun.
Chapter IV Troubled Waters
It is not easy in this world to take any definite step without annoying
somebody, and Kirk, in embarking on his wooing of Ruth Bannister,
failed signally to do so. Lora Delane Porter beamed graciously upon
him, like a pleased Providence, but the rest of his circle of
acquaintances were ill at ease.
The statement does not include Hank Jardine, for Hank was out of New
York; but the others, Shanklyn, the actor; Wren, the newspaper-man;
Bryce, Johnson, Willis, Appleton, and the rest, sensed impending change
in the air, and were uneasy, like cattle before a thunder-storm. The
fact that the visits of Mrs. Porter and Ruth to inquire after George,
now of daily occurrence, took place in the afternoon, while they,
Kirk's dependents, seldom or never appeared in the studio till drawn
there by the scent of the evening meal, it being understood that during
the daytime Kirk liked to work undisturbed, kept them ignorant of the
new development.
All they knew was that during the last two weeks a subtle change had
taken place in Kirk. He was less genial, more prone to irritability
than of old. He had developed fits of absent-mindedness, and was
frequently to be found staring pensively at nothing. To slap him on the
back at such moments, as Wren ventured to do on one occasion, Wren
belonging to the jovial school of thought which holds that nature gave
us hands in order to slap backs, was to bring forth a new and
unexpected Kirk, a Kirk who scowled and snarled and was hardly to be
appeased with apology. Stranger still, this new Kirk could be summoned
into existence by precisely the type of story at which, but a few weeks
back, he would have been the first to laugh.
Percy Shanklyn, whose conversation consisted of equal parts of
autobiography and of stories of the type alluded to, was the one to
discover this. His latest, which he had counted on to set the table in
a roar, produced from Kirk criticism so adverse and so crisply
delivered that he refrained from telling his latest but one and spent
the rest of the evening wondering, like his fellow visitors, what had
happened to Kirk and whether he was sickening for something.
Not one of them had the faintest suspicion that these symptoms
indicated that Kirk, for the first time in his easy-going life, was in
love. They had never contemplated such a prospect. It was not till his
conscientious and laborious courtship had been in progress for over two
weeks and was nearing the stage when he felt that the possibility of
revealing his state of mind to Ruth was not so remote as it had been,
that a chance visit of Percy Shanklyn to the studio during the
afternoon solved the mystery.
One calls it a chance visit because Percy had not been meaning to
borrow twenty dollars from Kirk that day at all. The man slated for the
loan was one Burrows, a kindly member of the Lambs Club. But fate and a
telegram from a manager removed Burrows to Chicago, while Percy was
actually circling preparatory to the swoop, and the only other man in
New York who seemed to Percy good for the necessary sum at that precise
moment was Kirk.
He flew to Kirk and found him with Ruth. Kirk's utter absence of any
enthusiasm at the sight of him, the reluctance with which he made
the introduction, the glumness with which he bore his share of the
three-cornered conversation, all these things convinced Percy that
this was no ordinary visitor.
Many years of living by his wits had developed in Percy highly
sensitive powers of observation. Brief as his visit was, he came away