“That’s fine and dandy,” answered the nice woman as she began to write rapidly upon the blank paper.  “If you’d drawn fifty swords on Willie and he had knocked you down with the butt end of his teaspoon I’d have put Willie on the run in my write-up.  Willie has handed me several little blows below the belt that I don’t like.  Pretends not to have met me, when Peter Scudder’s own sister, whom I knew at the settlement, introduced him to me; and what he did to Mabel Wright, our cub on weddings—­Oh, well, Mabel is another story.  Now—­that copy is ready to turn in when I pad it.  I wonder if I will get a favor from the manager or be turned out of the tea room permanently for reporting a fight as aristocratic as this in the sacred halls of the Ritz-Carlton.  I’d bet my shoe lacings that fifty people come here every afternoon for a week hoping it will happen again.”

“I do like this America, whose movement is so rapid,” I made remark as I set down my second cup of tea for the afternoon, this one emptied into my depths instead of the face of Mr. Saint Louis.

“That’s good, too,” returned my new-found friend with a laugh as she again wrote a word or two on the nice white paper.  Then she placed her elbow upon the table, leaned her very firm cheek on her hand, and regarded me with fine and honest and sympathetic eyes.  “I wonder what America is going to do to a beautiful boy like you.  I’m glad that you are going to beat it to the tall timbers of the Harpeth Valley.  There are women in New York who would eat you up alive.  There’s La Frigeda, alias Maggie Sullivan from Milwaukee, over there devouring you with her eyes at this moment, and that pretty little Stuyvesant Blaine debutante hasn’t taken her eyes off of you long enough to eat her spiced ice.  I know ’em both and could land something from either one if I introduced you in your title and very beautiful clothes.”

“Oh, I beg a pardon of you that I have not the time to have an introduction to your friends,” I exclaimed with a very true regret, because I did like that very nice woman and would have liked much to have brought advantage to her.  “In less than an hour I must ‘beat’ to those ‘tall timbers of Harpeth’ you mention.”

“Speaking of the State of Harpeth, I don’t know as you’ll be so safe after all, young friend, if that is any sample of the variety of women that flower in that classic land of the cotton and the magnolia which I met at Mrs. Creed Payne’s war baby tea the other afternoon,” mused my fine friend as I paid the garcon for the very good tea.  “She is in high-up political circles down there in Old Harpeth and from the bunch of women she was with I make a guess she is taking an interest in war contracts.  She was with that Mrs. Benton, who pulled off that spectacular deal for desiccated soups for Greece the other day.  My stomach is too delicate to feed soldiers dried dog and rotten cabbage melted down into glue in a can, but they may like the idea if not the soup.  Anyway, the woman was a beauty, so don’t you let her get you.”