“I supposed so, too.  It seems that I don’t.”

She looked down at her hand upon the rail, and said:  “Don’t misunderstand me.  Of course I think that papa is doing what is right.  Of course I am on his side.  I think your sympathy with the poor makes you extreme.  But ... you asked me the other day to try to see your point of view.  Well, I think I do see it now.  People,” said Cally, with a young dignity that became her well, “sometimes agree to disagree.  I feel—­now when we’ve quarreled so much—­that I’d like to be friends.”

The tall young man looked hurriedly away, down the dusky street.  In his mind were his articles, shooting about:  his terrible articles, where surely nobody would find any gentleness to surprise them.  They were the best thing he would ever do; precisely the thing he had always wanted to do.  And yet—­well he knew now that he had no joy in them....

“It’s tremendously generous of you,” he said, mechanically.

Cally’s eyes wavered from his face, and she answered:  “No, I’m not generous.”

Her struggle was to keep life fixed and constant, and all about her she found life fluent and changing.  Or perhaps life was constant, and the fluency was in her.  Or perhaps the difficulty was all in this man, about whom she had never been able to take any position that he did not shortly oust her from it.  Considering her resolution only last night, she too had thought, when she began, that she was carrying generosity to the point of downright disloyalty to papa.  By what strangeness of his expression did he make her feel that even this was not generous enough, that more was required of the daughter of the Works than merely withdrawing from all responsibility?...

V. Vivian regarded the lovely Hun.  As a prophet you might glory, but as a man you must face the music....

“But I must tell you,” he began, with visible effort, “that you—­you will feel very differently, when you’ve seen—­”

However, she interrupted him, raising her eyes with a little smile, sweet and somewhat sad.

“I’ll look after my part of it,” said she; and there was her pledge of amity held out, gloved in white.  “Do you think you can be my friend?”

The light showed another change in the young man’s face.  He took the hand, and said with sudden strange feeling: 

“Let my life prove it.”

So Cally turned away thinking that she had found that rarest thing among men, a friend of women.

And Mr. V.V. walked off blindly up the lamplit street, his heart a singing and a pain.

     XXVII

Of one of the Triumphs of Cally’s Life, and the Tete-a-tete following, which vaguely depresses her; of the Little Work-Girl who brought the Note that Sunday, oddly remet at Gentlemen’s Furnishings.

Canning was absent more than two weeks.  His attorney’s business had brought entanglements before and behind;