Masie rose to her feet.

“I think we had better be going home,” she said, coolly.  “It’s getting late.”

Carter humored her.  He had come to know her varying, thistle-down moods, and that it was useless to combat them.  But he felt a certain happy triumph.  He had held for a moment, though but by a silken thread, the soul of his wild Psyche, and hope was stronger within him.  Once she had folded her wings and her cool hand had closed about his own.

At the Biggest Store the next day Masie’s chum, Lulu, waylaid her in an angle of the counter.

“How are you and your swell friend making it? she asked.

“Oh, him?” said Masie, patting her side curls.  “He ain’t in it any more.  Say, Lu, what do you think that fellow wanted me to do?”

“Go on the stage?” guessed Lulu, breathlessly.

“Nit; he’s too cheap a guy for that.  He wanted me to marry him and go down to Coney Island for a wedding tour!”

IV

DOUGHERTY’S EYE-OPENER

Big Jim Dougherty was a sport.  He belonged to that race of men.  In Manhattan it is a distinct race.  They are the Caribs of the North—­strong, artful, self-sufficient, clannish, honorable within the laws of their race, holding in lenient contempt neighboring tribes who bow to the measure of Society’s tapeline.  I refer, of course, to the titled nobility of sportdom.  There is a class which bears as a qualifying adjective the substantive belonging to a wind instrument made of a cheap and base metal.  But the tin mines of Cornwall never produced the material for manufacturing descriptive nomenclature for “Big Jim” Dougherty.

The habitat of the sport is the lobby or the outside corner of certain hotels and combination restaurants and cafes.  They are mostly men of different sizes, running from small to large; but they are unanimous in the possession of a recently shaven, blue-black cheek and chin and dark overcoats (in season) with black velvet collars.

Of the domestic life of the sport little is known.  It has been said that Cupid and Hymen sometimes take a hand in the game and copper the queen of hearts to lose.  Daring theorists have averred—­not content with simply saying—­that a sport often contracts a spouse, and even incurs descendants.  Sometimes he sits in the game of politics; and then at chowder picnics there is a revelation of a Mrs. Sport and little Sports in glazed hats with tin pails.

But mostly the sport is Oriental.  He believes his women-folk should not be too patent.  Somewhere behind grilles or flower-ornamented fire escapes they await him.  There, no doubt, they tread on rugs from Teheran and are diverted by the bulbul and play upon the dulcimer and feed upon sweetmeats.  But away from his home the sport is an integer.  He does not, as men of other races in Manhattan do, become the convoy in his unoccupied hours of fluttering laces and high heels that tick off delectably the happy seconds of the evening parade.  He herds with his own race at corners, and delivers a commentary in his Carib lingo upon the passing show.