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She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows. “I know I’m not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we’ve no time to lose. And if I’m a trifle irritable you won’t mind?–for I’m more than usually nervous.”

“Don’t bother with me this morning, if you are tired,” urged Everett. “I can come quite as well tomorrow.”

“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor that he remembered as a part of her. “It’s solitude that I’m tired to death of–solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister, not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to me–condoning it, you know–and trying to patch up my peace with my conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my talent.”

Everett laughed. “Oh! I’m afraid I’m not the person to call after such a serious gentleman–I can’t sustain the situation. At my best I don’t reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble uses you will devote yourself?”

Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed: “I’m not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn’t study that method.”

She laughed and went on nervously: “The parson’s not so bad. His English never offends me, and he has read Gibbon’s

Decline and Fall

, all five volumes, and that’s something. Then, he has been to New York, and that’s a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you’re just on from there. How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother’s old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays? You see, I’m homesick for it all, from the Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!” She was interrupted by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in the production of the

Rheingold

, when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As he did so she said, quietly: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!” and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.