“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.  You have no character, no will—­”

She shook her head, laughing.

“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said.  “You change your mind about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”

“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”

“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”

“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that!  I want some one to tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”

“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near think so, too.  But I can’t dine with you, Pete.  Wouldn’t you like to go to my meeting?”

“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to dine at his college’s local club.  Here he found an old friend, who most fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.  The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in Wall Street.  Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.  He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock.  His mother was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde.  He had been counting on finding one.

Before long his mother came in.  She was looking very fine.  She had on a new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs. Wayne’s usually did.

She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which had not struck her as revolutionary.  Accustomed to strange meals in strange company—­a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with a wavering drunkard,—­she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough.  But she was not sorry to find it had been enlarged.  She liked to meet new people.  She was extremely optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects.  When she saw Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the working-girl’s club.  The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she knew well by reputation.  She wondered if she could make him see that his position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.