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“What is your name?” asked Fitz, trying to feign interest.

“Evelyn,” said she, “but my intimate friends call me Eve.”

“Huh!” said Fitz grossly, “Eve ate the apple first.”

“Yes,” sighed Eve, “and gave Adam the core. Nowadays, I heard mamma say to Count Grassi, it’s the other way ’round.”

“My father says,” said Fitz, “that Eve ought to of been spanked.”

Certain memories reddened Eve; but the natural curiosity to compare experiences got the better of her maiden reticence upon so delicate a subject. She lowered her voice.

“Do you yell?” she asked. “I do. It frightens them if you yell.”

“I was never spanked” said Fitz. “When I’m naughty mamma writes to papa, and he writes to me, and says he’s sorry to hear that I haven’t yet learned to be a gentleman, and a man of the world, and an American. That’s worse than being spanked.”

“Oh, dear!” said Eve, “I don’t mind what people say; that’s just water on a duck’s back; but what they do is with slippers–“

“And,” cried Fitz, elated with his own humor, “it isn’t on the duck’s–back.”

“Are you yourself to-day,” asked Miss Eve, her eyes filling, “or are you just unusually horrid?”

“Here–I say–don’t blub,” said Fitz, in real alarm. And, knowing the power of money to soothe, he pulled a twenty-franc gold piece from his pocket and himself opened and closed one of her tiny hands upon it.

The child’s easy tears dried at once.

“Really–truly?–ought I?” she exclaimed.

“You bet!” said Fitz, all his beautiful foreign culture to the fore. “You just keep that and surprise yourself with a present next time you want one.”

“Maybe mamma won’t like me to,” she doubted. And then, with devilish wisdom, “I think mamma will scold me first–and let me forget to give it back afterward. Thank you, Fitz. I could kiss you!”

“Fire away,” said Fitz sullenly. He was used to little girls, and liked to kiss them, but he did not like them to kiss him. She didn’t, however.

She caught his hand with the one of hers that was not clutching the gold piece, and squeezed it quickly and let it go. Something in this must have touched and made appeal to the manly heart. For Fitz said, averting his beautiful eyes:

“You’re a funny little pill, aren’t you?”

The tiger sprang to the victoria step from loafing in front of a jeweller’s window, and stiffened into a statue of himself. Madame was coming.

“Take Evelyn to the lift, Fitz,” said she. But first she kissed Evelyn, and said that she was going to send for her soon, for a spree with Fitz.

They passed through the court-yard, Fitz carrying his hat like a gentleman and a man of the world, and into the dark passage that led to the famous elevator.

“Your mother’s smart,” said Eve.

“Can’t you think of anything but how smart people are?”

“When I’m grown up,” she said, “and am smart myself I’ll think of other things, I dare say.”

“Can you work the lift yourself? Hadn’t I better take you up?”

“Oh, no,” she said, and held out her hand.

They shook, she firmly, he with the flabby, diffident clasp of childhood and old age.

“You’re a funny kid,” said Fitz.

“You’re rather a dear,” said Eve.

She entered the elevator, closed the door, and disappeared upward, at the pace of a very footsore and weary snail.

Mrs. Burton was much cheered by Mrs. Williams’s visit, as who that struggles is not by the notice of the rich and the mighty?

“My dear,” she said, when Eve entered, “she is so charming, so natural; she has promised to give a tea for me, and to present me to some of her friends. I hope you like the boy–Fitz–Fritz–whatever his name is. It would be so nice if you were to be friends.”

“He is nice,” said Eve, “ever so nice–but so dull.”

“What did you talk about?” asked Mrs. Burton,

“Really,” said Eve, aged seven, “I forget.”

III

Mrs. Burton had made a failure of her own life.

She had married a man who subsequently had been so foolish as to lose his money–or most of it.