“You don’t want to run me out to the golf club first?”

“Not possible, dear.  The chauffeur can take you in the big car.”

“Yes, but he’ll scold me all the way about there not being room enough in the garage.”

Crystal was firm.  “I’m sorry, but I can’t, dear.  This is important.  I may take a job.  I’ll tell you all about it this evening.”  And she left the room, with a smile that kept getting entirely beyond her control.

“What’s this?  What’s this?” cried Eddie as the door shut.  “A job.  You wouldn’t let Crystal take a job, would you, Mr. Cord?”

“I haven’t been consulted,” said Mr. Cord, taking out his new driver again.

“But didn’t you notice how excited she was.  I’m sure it’s decided.”

“Yes, I noticed, Eddie; but it looked to me more like a man than a job.  How do you think we’d come out if I gave you a stroke and a half a hole?”

Eddie was too perturbed even to answer.

In the meantime, Crystal was spinning along Bellevue Avenue, forgetting to bow to her friends, and wondering why the car was going so badly until, her eye falling on the speedometer, she noticed that she was doing a mild thirty-five miles an hour.  Sooner, therefore, than the law allowed, she reached a small park that surrounds a statue of Perry, and there she picked up a passenger.

Ben got in and shut the little door almost before she brought the car to a standstill.

[Illustration:  “I’ll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car”]

“When you were little,” he said, “did you ever imagine something wonderful that might happen—­like the door’s opening and a delegation coming to elect you captain of the baseball team, or whatever is a little girl’s equivalent of that—­and keep on imagining it and imagining it, until it seemed as if it really were going to happen?  Well, I have been standing here saying to myself, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Crystal should come in a little blue car and take me to drive?  And, by Heaven! you’ll never believe me, but she actually did.”

“Tell me everything you’ve done since I saw you,” she answered.

“I haven’t done anything but think about you.  Oh yes, I have, too.  I’ve reappraised the universe.  You see, you’ve just made me a present of a brand-new world, and I’ve been pretty busy, I can tell you, untying the string and unwrapping the paper, and bless me, Crystal, it looks like a mighty fine present so far.”

“Oh,” she said, “I think you talk charmingly.”  She had started to say, “you make love charmingly,” but on second thoughts decided that the overt statement had better come from him.  “Dear me,” she went on, “we have so much to talk about.  There’s my job.  Can’t we talk a little about that?”

They could and did.  Their talk consisted largely in his telling her how much richer a service she could render his paper through having been unconsciously steeped in beauty than if she had been merely intellectually instructed—­than if, as she more simply put it, she had known something.  And as he talked, her mind began to expand in the warm atmosphere of his praise and to give off its perfume like a flower.