“Hadn’t you better leave this to me?”

“I had, my dear, I most certainly had.  I was all wrong to mention it,” he answered very humbly.

* * * * *

From this night on, Baird changed his tack.  Although soon busy with the plans for the hospital, to be built at once, he said little about it to Deborah.  Instead, he insisted on taking her off on little evening sprees uptown.

“Do you know what’s the matter with both of us?” he said to her one evening.  “We’ve been getting too durned devoted to our jobs and our ideals.  You’re becoming a regular school marm and I’m getting to be a regular slave to every wretched little babe who takes it into his head to be born.  We haven’t one redeeming vice.”

And again he took up dancing.  The first effort which he made, down at Deborah’s school one evening, was a failure quite as dismal as his attempts of the previous year.  But he did not appear in the least discouraged.  He came to the house one Friday night.

“I knew I could learn to dance,” he said, “in spite of all your taunts and jibes.  That little fiasco last Saturday night—­”

“Was perfectly awful,” Deborah said.

“Did not discourage me in the least,” he continued severely.  “I decided the only trouble with me was that I’m tall and I’ve got to bend—­to learn to bend.”

“Tremendously!”

“So I went to a lady professor, and she saw the point at once.  Since then I’ve had five lessons, and I can fox-trot in my sleep.  To-morrow is Saturday.  Where shall we go?”

“To the theater.”

“Good.  We’ll start with that.  But the minute the play is over we’ll gallop off to the Plaza Grill—­just as the music is in full swing—­”

“And we’ll dance,” she groaned, “for hours.  And when I get home, I’ll creep into bed so tired and sore in every limb—­”

“That you’ll sleep late Sunday morning.  And a mighty good thing for you, too—­if you ask my advice—­”

“I don’t ask your advice!”

“You’re getting it, though,” he said doggedly.  “If you’re still to be a friend of mine we’ll dance at the Plaza to-morrow night—­and well into the Sabbath.”

“The principal of a public school—­dancing on the Sabbath.  Suppose one of my friends should see us there.”

“Your friends,” he replied with a fine contempt, “do not dance in the Plaza Grill.  I’m the only roisterer you know.”

“All right,” she conceded grudgingly, “I’ll roister.  Come and get me.  But I’d much prefer when the play is done to come home and have milk and crackers here.”

“Deborah,” he said cheerfully, “for a radical school reformer you’re the most conservative woman I know.”

CHAPTER XVIII